Alphabet Wall: Making…p is for plant
A phone message from one of our friends at Sunday School requesting parents to bring a photo for a craft project the kids will be making for the month’s theme of “God made me” reminded me of this simple science experiment from my primary school days. 🙂
Red or green beans on cotton wool presents a wonderful way of allowing a child to observe the growth from seed to sprout as they water the plant and watch its progress day by day.
Very short list of materials for this week’s craft: Two or three small green or red beans, a small shallow dish, cotton wool, water.
1. Place the cotton wool into the bottle cap and the beans on top of the cotton wool. Add some water.
2. Explain to your child that this will grow into a plant. Place this in a sunny spot, like near a window.
4. In a day’s time, you should be able to see a tiny white shoot making its way out. Keep watering your little plant, and in a few more days, you’ll see that the little bean has taken root and and grown a healthy green shoot, maybe with a leaf or two!
For the Alphabet Wall craft, you could ask your child to draw a picture of the plant they helped to water and grow, and write the letter p on their completed work.
Aside from teaching our children how a plant germinates from just a tiny seed, I think it’s also a wonderful object lesson for us all in appreciating the power of God in Genesis in creating ALL the vegetation and plants that covered the earth in a single day, when we have to wait a couple of days just to see one single green shoot! 😀
Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day. Genesis 1: 11-13
10am Additional note: After breakfast this morning we went to check on our little five-day-old plants. DS was so excited he kept going back again and again to check on it. I think I should start looking for a little pot to put them in. 🙂