Botany II

So here is the basic plan, organized into 12 lessons. Three each week for four weeks. My plan is to finish the second half of our 5th Grade Botany. I will record what we actually did in italics.

Day 1:
~Review- read over and organize the pages from Botany I.
~Read Kovacs Botany Chapter 9
~Draw or paint the lilac bush at Oma's house
~Write: "It is the Earth Force which hardens the wood of a tree. The sun makes the fine flower."


We did a great review, YoungSon1 and I read through all his work from Botany I and I read Chapter 9 of the Kovacs book. All the morning long he was telling me he didn't feel well and just wanted to lay down. It is always hard to tell, especially on the first day of lessons, if "doesn't feel well" means getting sick or just not motivated. But we worked through it. I was quite pleased that he did his main-lesson page while I was getting us ready to go to town. When he told me he would rather stay home and look at books than go to the river to play, I knew he was getting sick. His drawing reflected that. NOT his best drawing. But he did mount a fever later that evening.

Day 2:
~Read Kovacs Botany Chapters 10 and 11.
~Finish sentences: "A deciduous tree is _____." and "The deciduous trees in our forest are ___, ____, ____, and ____."
~Draw a leaf with parallel veins and a leaf with reticulate veins.
~Collect leaves from each of the deciduous trees of the Boreal Forest, make rubbings, press them and label them.

He completed the tasks for Day 2 and made a cover for his Botany II lesson book.  I felt like I was dragging the lesson out of him, but when I look back on what he did I realize not only did he do really good work, he did more of it than I planned. -And he was sick yesterday. He has not finished his drawing  for the page he wrote about Lower and Higher Plants, but I feel like he did quite a bit already to day and want him to spend some of his summer day playing in the 85 degree weather.






















Day 3: The Blossom and Pollen
~ Read Kovex Chapters 12 and 13
~Copy drawing of flower
~Bike to Ann's Green House to look at LOTS of different flowers and choose a few to bring home and place in a planter for YoungSon1 to care for.
~Quest for Irises up the road, dig them up and bring them home. Check out their root system/bulb, leaves and how the flower will form.
~Along the way, gather as many different flowers as we can, identify them and press them for the MLB (main lesson book).

My guys still aren't feeling so hot (well, given that its 90 degrees outside, they are feeling WAY hot, but sick) we didn't quest for Iris or ride bikes to Ann's. YoungSon1 did copy the picture of a flower and began to copy the Steiner poem "Kind hearts are gardens." He asked if he could finish tomorrow and I felt that was just fine. While reading the Kovacs book, he went and got quite a few roses and we took them apart, watched the pollen poof and saw all the tiny inside pieces. That wasn't part of the plan, but a great thing to be able to do!

























The Real Day 4:
I realized that the roses were almost gone. Even though we have not covered Dicotyledons or the rose yet, it felt important to draw and look and talk about roses when the roses were here. And they are barely here any more! We really had to quest to find a rose with five petals left. But we did. We sat down to draw it and YoungSon1 was very intimidated by the prospect. I drew mine at the same time as he drew his and helped him to really try and see what was infront of him. He did a nice job. The lists on the page were created by me asking questions about the rose infront of us. "What kind of veins does a rose have? Is the stem hollow and milky or thick and woody?" It was interesting that when he drew his rose hip (from memory) he added the dried sepals. I asked what they were on the end of each rose hip and he didn't know what they were. Just that they were there and there were always five. After a bit of a talk he realized that they were the sepals. I love it when you see the "click" happen. 

Day 4 (now day 5): Flowers, Butterflies and Bees
~Read Kovacs Chapters 14 and 15
~Read The Nettle and the Butterfly
~YoungSon1 read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to YoungSon3
~Copy drawing of life cycle of a butterfly
~Begin the The Bee Book by Jacob Streit
This was one of our more difficult days. YoungSon1 simply wanted to be doing other things with his summer morning. It lead to some big yuck and eventualy ended in a major consiquence that was so big, I was sad for him. I offered him a chance to show that he can practice self control choose to focus even when he wants to do other things and earn back what he had given up with the choices of the morning. It is odd that there can be such a struggle and yet the work that he turns out is quite good. 

 We read the Butterfly and the Nettle, we looked at the bug book, we spoke about butterflies we have seen. YoungSon1 recognized that the life cycle of a butterfly was similar to the life cycle of a bee and an ant. He shared the life cycle of an ant as he remembers it (mostly correctly, only struggling with terminology) and we compared them. I let him know that the pupae of a butterfly is actually in the cocoon and the the chrysalis.    

Day 5: Iris
~Read Kovacs Chapter 16 (about the tulip)
~Read about Irises and onions in North West Plant Book
~Make Iris painting (onion too?)
~Take the Iris apart and check out all the different parts.

We had a review of reticulated and parallel venation in plants and named a few we could think of with each kind of leaf. Then we read the Kovacs chapter about tulips, stopping frequently to remember the tulip bulbs Opa plants each winter. Lots of comparison with the reading on YoungSon1's part. Garlic, Lilly, Daffodil. He brought up onion before the chapter got to them. When we finished I asked him what plants grow wild in the Interior that are like tulip. He had to think for a few minutes and said Iris and onion. I had stopped by Noni's house and dug up some irises, onions, and lilies for us to check out and plant. So we went and did that. We noticed that the roots were soft and white, that they didn't branch much (other than the tiny little "harry growths" as YoungSon1 noticed). We looked at the iris flower and opened a lily bud. We saw that the sepal becomes the petal on the iris and that there simply is no calyx on the lily - it just opens into petals.  All new and incredible for me to see. 

 Then we went inside (just in time- the mesquitos were begining to eat us alive) and to paint. YoungSon3 joined us.

We painted an iris and an onion. YoungSon1 had to run outside to count the petals on the iris and still wasn't quite sure. He thought he counted six. When he came back to the painting table, he had the plant book open to iris and asked me to read about it. It turns out irises have three petals and three sepals that are as purple and soft as the petals. Some botanists argue that the iris has no sepals and six petals. One of the goals of this second botany block, and the reason I am doing this in the summer, is that I want to encourage real looking. True seeing. We just touched on that with the rose, this was another good practice.

YoungSon1's iris and onion.

While painting we had an interesting discussion. We had no plan to have this conversation, it just came up as we were painting yellow and blue. I began by remembering winter solstice and the week of minerals. I said something along the lines of "a stone has a body..." and YoungSon1 was quick to finish for me by adding "but it isn't alive." What about a plant? YoungSon1 was right there. "A plant has a body and is alive, but it doesn't have a spirit unless a fairy fills it and borrows its body, but that would be a fairy spirit in a plant, not a plant spirit." Well okay then. Somehow this was covered - or it just makes so much sense to him, he has thought it out on his own. I asked what it meant to be alive. YoungSon1 answered that to be alive, you need to breath in and out, eat, drink (and move "juice" through your body in a pattern), and be warm. (I was so tempted to talk cold vs. warm blooded, but I thought is answer was quite good, and didn't want to complicate things.) So I summarized for him saying it sounded like to be alive you needed to exist with all four elements. He agreed. I would like to review his Man and Animal main lesson book as the beginning of our next lesson and continue the conversation a little more. Wouldn't it be great if we had done geology by Advent and each week we could review geology, botany, then man and animal? After 7th grade we could add in anatomy main lesson review. Oh I am totally doing this!


Day 6: Seeds and Cotyleadons
~begin the "growth of a bean" project
~ read Kovacs Botany chapter 17
~read Introducing Monocotyledons from Live Ed. Botany pg. 41
~cut some stems of monocots to see the vascular bundles
~dig up roots and examine the root systems of monocots
~find monocot leaves to press
~count petals on monocots
~begin working on creating our own version of this chart for MLB focusing on the Monocot side

I hope our final "chart" looks more like this one:

We began the growth of a bean project: 

We then read Kovacs and Live Ed. I felt that the Live ed was a bit to "out there," it felt quite esoteric. Not that I have a problem with esoteric! But Kovacs does such a nice job of saying that the plant is "reaching to the sun because it is in love with the sun..." etc. while Live Ed felt like it was talking to an adult. Kovacs held YoungSon1's attention while Live Ed lost it. And that boy is usually right there with "out there" comparisons. I will need to read the grasses section better before I read it to him. 

Anyway, after reading, we made a list of the characteristics that monocotyledons have in common. I had YoungSon1 come up with the sentences that go with each component, much to his chagrin. Oh, he really didn't like it. But he did it in the end. (He knew I was planning to share a cookie with the kids who did good work and made lessons enjoyable. That was a straight up bribe, but frankly, it made our morning so much more pleasant, I would do it again in a heart beat.) And I am pleased with his work.

Day 7: Grasses

~visit UAF botanical gardens and see the grain garden

~read Kovacs chapter 26

~read Introducing the Grasses from Live Ed. Botany pg 47

~YoungSon1 read Dr. Gerbert Grohman quote from pg 48 of Live Ed. and then fill in the blanks. I made a work sheet found here

~make grass illustration for MLB

Gosh, this feels like so long ago! We did not go to the botanical gardens, I am going to make that happen this week. We did read Kovacs chapter 26 and I summarized the Grasses from Live ed. Botany. We read Corn is Maze, which was a VERY good spontaneous addition to the lesson. YoungSon1 read some of it and I read some of it. We then drew a picture very much like the one in Live Ed. I really wanted to try and draw different grains and label them, but that would have been too much for one day and didn't feel right having only seen the grains in a book, not first hand.  Finally, together we read the quote from Dr. Gerbert Grohman and I gave YoungSon1 a copy of the quote with spaces and had him read it and fill in the blanks. The quote on the Grasses page came from the Kovacs chapter. It is "We call our breakfast food 'cerial,' but in botany, creal is the name for all the grain bearing plants that give us flour for our food. They are all different kinds of grass."

Day 8: Dicotots

Well, I went into this day without a clear plan, and it all worked out okay, but sheesh  I can get myself into trouble that way! We found this painting made a few years ago and labeled it as a compound leaf after reading Kovacs chapter 18. We reviewed monocotyledons and then spoke about how dicotyledons are different. I realized that the information I was presenting needed to clarified. I was saying that a dicot will have five petals. When I should have said, if it has five petals (or a multiple of five) you know it is a dicot. Same for tap roots. Not all dicots have tap roots, but all plants with tap roots are dicots. Also true for woody stems or trunks.  So to end the day we completed the other half of his page from Day 6. I love his flower!

Day 9: The Dandelion, Higher Plants and the four Elements

~Read Kovacs Chapter 2 The Dandelion

~Talk about higher plants

~Illustrate a "Flower Goddess" or Architipial Flower (I want YoungSon1 to know that this flower is to be a symbol of the Higher Plants, not "a rose" or "a fire weed")

~Write above "The Higher Plants grow and develop within the four elements." and help YoungSon1 see how the four elements are present and necessary for fungi, but more balanced in the Higher Plants. 

~Along one side right Fire, Air, Water, Earth and along the other side right the corresponding part of the plant: Blossom, Leaf, Stem, Roots. (I may be diverging from Steiner/Gothe here because I think they would say that stem is earth and roots are water, but I'm just REALLY not feeling that and couldn't teach it.)

~Have YoungSon1 compose a sentence for each part of the plant that explains how or why they  are associated with each element.

~Read The Dandelion's Cousin

~Paint a Dandelion

We Read Kovacs Chapter 2, but now (the next morning) I feel like we skipped the talk about Higher Plants. YoungSon1 drew a Higher Flower and wrote the sentence  the elements and corresponding parts of the plant. There was a great deal of struggle when he realized that I wanted 5 sentences total and four of them to be composed by him. He didn't know what to write, he didn't remember anything I read, I started reading again and got angry when he started talking to his brother in the middle of me reading, it quickly became a mess. Now I can see a few things. 1: the boy is afraid to write. He knows his spelling is likely to be wrong and his letters swapped. 2: the boy needs to get over that and just do it anyway. And I told him so. 3: We didn't discuss Higher and Lower Plants the way I would like to have (and I will do so this morning). It is a conversation we have had at the beginning of this block, but it is a concept we have not revisited. His sentences were quite nice though. 

He wrote "The blossom resembles a tiny sun. The leaves breath in carbon dioxide and out oxygen. The stem sucks up water from the roots. The roots give the plant nourishment."

I find it strange that he can have such a fit, threaten to rip up his paper or scribble all over it or do his worst work, get sent to work on his own cause no one wants to be around an attitude such as that one, than, 20 minutes later, stomp out of the school room and put something in front of me that is so very nice.

We read the Dandelion's Cousin, but did not paint as it had gotten to late. We will paint at the beginning of today's lesson.