We started off our morning with Seeds, a book by Ken Robbins. After talking about the way that plants grow from seeds last week, this was a good follow up because it discusses the different ways that plants manage to spread their seeds far away. It covered everything from dandelions to plants with burrs.
We walked around with the group and everyone picked a plant that they will pay close attention to for the rest of the summer. We are hoping that the kids will be able to notice the changes that occur and how the plant's life cycle carries out.
While checking out the Tomato plants, one of the teachers noticed a bizarre caterpillar resting under one of the leaves. It reminded me much of the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. Some bugs are beneficial to the farm, such as certain Butterflies, Earthworms, etc. while others are highly damaging, like the Cutterworm, so before I picked it off of the plant, I brought Rich over to check it out.
He identified it as a Tomato Horn Worm, a damaging insect at the farm. After letting all of the kids check it out, we ran over to the coop to give the chickens a snack :P
We showed the kids a cool plant that we have in the greenhouse, the Sensitive Plant. The video below is able to show why it would be called this...
There is some more interesting information on Wikipedia..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimosa_pudica
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