Montessori Inspired Plant and Tree Activity Trays for Preschoolers

A long overdue post on our plant and tree studies early this month.  Last month, I bought Vito an indoor plant to care for.  Through that plant, he learned that it needs water, sunlight and air to survive.  But because it’s been really hot and we were away most the time, it wilted.  We took it out so we can reuse the pot and Vito saw webbed roots and was immediately fascinated by it!  He didn’t know what to call it yet, thus I decided to give him an introduction to the parts of the plant so he’ll know the right word to describe the parts.

PARTS OF A TREE

This was the initial set-up, and we worked on this:  Montessori tree puzzle and Parts of a Tree Cards.  Then Mavi suggested that we use our tree figures from our Playmobil sets.  Oh my, that boy of mine is totally a genius!  It was the closest hands-on activity we ever hand on identifying the parts of a tree.

I used these tree models to identify and differentiate each part of the tree. 

He also worked on his Montessori puzzle because he obviously loves all these botany and zoology puzzles!  The tree book in the photo was from Amazon (Tree My First Discovery Book).

This sorting activity was inspired by my friend Renae Every Star Is Different.  We first used the pieces of the puzzle, then we moved on to the Playmobil figures.

He had more fun dismantling the figures   How I wish all the Montessori puzzles has something like this (similar to our shark model).

LIFE CYCLE OF A GREEN BEAN PLANT

You might have read this already.  I talked about this late last month.  In this activity we used the Safari Ltd Life Cycle Green Bean Plant figures to demonstrate how plants grow.

PLANTING AND SORTING ACTIVITIES

Vito loves using our Vegetable Counters to play pretend at home on gardening.  You might think why not do it outside?  Well, we may have a very large backyard but we don’t own it, so obviously we can’t plant anything in there   Thus, the kids’ closest experience to gardening is caring for indoor plants and do imaginative play similar to this.  I don’t worry about it though as they have gardening subject in school!

PARTS OF A PLANT

Here we identified the basic parts of a plant:  leaf, stem, flower, bud and roots.  You can read more about it here.

COUNTING TREES

We enjoyed working on this counting activity using our Montessori sandpaper numbers and tree figures from Safari Toob.

TREE MATCHING ACTIVITY

This is for visual discrimination and concentration.  I realized that I have these from years ago!  I gave it to Vito to play with and he said “Mommy, I like this game very much”.  You can DOWNLOAD A FREE COPY of this printable here. 

ROOT VIEWING AND GROWING PLANTS IN WATER

Have you heard of a root viewer? Well, I’ve been wanting one for the longest time but it’s not available here.  So after searching  through Pinterest on ideas how to view roots (because Vito was obsessed with them), I came across on some Pins of growing seeds and bulb in water.  It was a perfect!! I didn’t need to buy anything, but just reuse our ginger and scallops for this activity. 

We submerged half of our ginger and scallops in the water, and after a week we can see the roots growing (and new leaves for the scallops too!).   It was awesome!

THE FUNCTION OF A STEM

Vito is just so full of wonder these days!! He was obsessed with the idea of stem acting like straw inorder to deliver water to the plants.  Because of this, we made some rainbow flowers.  More of this here.

LIFE CYCLE OF A TREE PUZZLE

I love life cycle layered puzzles and this one from GOKI was the only one I could find for a tree.    To work on this, I would separate the puzzle pieces by layer so we can work one layer at a time.

I hope you enjoyed this collection of plant and tree activities!  I would love it if you try it at home with your kids, and then tell me all about it!

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