Kindergarten Learn About Seeds and Plant Beans

How to plant beans with 25 kindergartner students?
There's lots of ways to group the students for optimal learning.  Today with Ms Zamora's Spanish classes we are indoors, and will plant a couple of bean seeds in plastic bags.
The students are learning to practice awareness, appreciation and stewardship...

First we recap plant parts: flor, hoja, raiz, semilla, tallo. 

Then I show some crop seedlings that have been given us by Arlington Food Assistance Center. One or two students recognize the salad as lettuce, some others recognize the blue-green cabbage family seedlings as kale. We identify the collard seedlings. Students mention spinach and carrots and I describe those too.

I also show a mini-greenhouse with beans, squash, corn and sunflowers planted three days ago.

The beans are sprouting, and pushing up a shoot and roots as the seed splits.  The sprouts have grown since breakfast time!
Look at the three different kinds of seeds on the plates: here are corn, beets and cucumber.

We also pass around living seed potatoes  and see the green shoots beginning to grow out of the eyes.

Ms Zamora runs through what plant needs to grow - sun or light, water, air, a place to grow and for roots to anchor.  Ms Zamora's diagrams are on the whiteboard.

Planting Beans Activity
The individual student activity is to:
a) Label/name your quart plastic bag with Sharpie
b) Add a scoop of soil to the quart bag (the place). The soil is damp from the rain last night, so we don't need to add more water
c) Add dos frijoles - two beans
d) Leave in the light to grow for a few days and observe

I find a very large grub and a white pebble in the soil sample.  This is an excellent opportunity to discuss non-living and living things which is on the K curriculum.  The grub has six legs and will change (through metamorphosis) into a beetle. Some students find worms in the soil. We discuss that the soil has many other animals in it, and bacteria and fungi, some too small to see. It looks and smells like pretty healthy soil!

Ms Zamora's classes will observe the beans germinating over the next few days.
This is part of an extended and successful project growing vegetables outdoors. It is very much a partnered project with the school custodians helping students and Ms Zamora to plant, water and look after the vegetables.

Today also Jose, one of the custodians, planted red onions in the vegetable patch outside Ms Zamora's class.

Ms Zamora will then use the onions and other vegetables planted here as a teaching tool later on with many classes. Classes will also sample salads and other vegetables. Over the summer tomatoes will be growing and Ms Zamora will add photos of the ripening vegetables on her website for students and families to see.

Thank you to Ms Zamora and the generosity of the school custodians and families for enabling this learning about growing food and nutrition in both Spanish and English for many students at Jamestown!
Thank you to Arlington Food Assistance Center for donations of seeds and seedlings.