Planting Seeds With Children: Learning About Where Our Food Comes From
Spring is here and I’m eager to start planting seeds with children at school and in my backyard garden. We’re not quite ready to plant seeds directly in the garden. Overnight it’s still below freezing and some days are still too cold.
We ARE ready to plant seeds indoors and start growing some little seedlings. Little bits of green life are so nice to see on the cloudy, grey spring days.
I’m growing lots of seedlings at home, and I always bring my seed collection to school to let students choose some seeds to plant too.
Foods That Grow
The first thing we talk about is what foods grow. Our class named different foods that grow and we talked about what they look like when they’re growing. For example, potato plants are green and bushy and the potatoes grow underground, just like carrots and onions. We also talked about how tomatoes start as small green spheres and as they grow bigger, they turn yellow, orange, and then red.
Next we talk about what the plants need to grow: water, sun, and soil. We used plastic bags with a paper towel as the soil. We added a little bit of water, just enough to wet the whole paper towel, and then some seeds that students chose. We closed the bags and taped them up on our window.
Another day, we talked about where the foods in our lunch bags came from. Students were able to trace them back to a grocery store but were stuck when they were asked how did it get to the grocery store.
We talked about how foods that grow have to start at farms. In the winter in Canada, it’s too cold and snowy to grow food. Farmers around the world grow and harvest the foods. They send them on trucks to be washed and bagged. Then they’re sent on trucks, airplanes, trains, or ships all over the world and then all over the country to different grocery stores. The grocery stores put them on the shelves and people come to the store and buy them. They take them home and put them in the fridge. It’s a long trip for the food!
Think: Why is it better for the environment to buy fruits and vegetables that have been grown close to where we live?
Students came to the conclusion that it is great for the environment when we grow food in our own backyards.
Video: Planting Seeds with Children
Here’s a video of my sons and I planting seeds in soil and putting a few bean seeds in plastic bags to hang in a window.
