Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant

This is a follow-up activity on our Montessori Inspired Parts of a Plant.

After learning about the parts of a plant, Vito and I talked about how plants grow.  We walked around the estate and identified baby plants, some of them were just actually sprouting off the ground and this amazed Vito.  We also read the book How A Seed Grows to go along with our activity, this is a really good book!  The book illustrates the different stages of a plant’s (bean plant) life, from the preparations to planting up to the the part where the grown plant needs to be moved into a ground soil.  We have a few of these Read and Find Out books and Mavi loves to use them as reference.  Anyway, aside from the book, I also used the very beautiful Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant from Safari Toob and a homemade life cycle cards (this are now available in my shop, Early Childhood Life Cycle Mats).

We did two activities during our study.  The first one was matching the objects to our life cycle cards.  This is very simple.  As we match an object, I would make him describe the changes of the bean seed from each stages.  Something like, “when we planted the seed in the ground, what happened next?”.  I encouraged him to describe it to me through the images and the features in the objects.  This is the reason why I love life cycle figures of the Safari Toob, they’re so detailed!

You can get the Green Bean Plant life cycle cards from my shop, Early Childhood Life Cycle Mats.

Our first activity was to sequence the life cycle figures by observing the differences among themselves.

The second activity was sequencing the life cycle figures without the cards.  This was fun!  To encourage him to sequence the objects, we were pretending to plant the seed, and I would ask him what happens to the seed once we water it and give it sunlight.

Now, whenever we are out, he would keep on looking for some sprouts and keep on saying that they will grow to be big plants.  The activities plus the use of educational toys are a perfect match for making learning fun and of course for enhancing knowledge retention.  There are other ways to do this as well, one of which is by growing watercress at home.  Last year the boys witnessed how the watercress grew from seed to having leaves!  Read about it here, Growing Watercress with Kids at Home.

Kids these days are so lucky!  These learning toys are popping up everywhere and they can be great at making learning more interactive.  They’re so detailed that you can easily describe what’s happening in each cycle rather than memorizing them from a book.  These life cycle figures from Safari Toob and Insect Lore are highly recommended!

More learning materials at Pinay Homeschooler Shop.

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