Here’s a collaborative worksheet / art project that can help prepare youngsters for playing the running and collecting plant game called “For Plants to Live and Grow.’ You can find directions and cards for this active, outdoor game in the printed book Circling the Sun, Racing the Wind on pages 30 – 35. You can also access it, for free, in the draft version of the book available at this website. Just use the link: https://evolvingbeauty.org/a-draft-of-the-activities-collection-circling-the-sun-racing-the-wind/. (In this earlier version, the cards for collecting and the game’s instructions are also on pages 30 – 35.)
For most land plants to grow collaborative puzzle Final 2024 copyWe encourage you and your students to begin your plant discoveries by deliberately and patiently interacting with the living plants that are your everyday companions. Do your best to make certain that the children have experiences watching plants, big and little, growing around their schools, back yards, nature preserves, parks, neighborhood gardens, window sills, or nearby farms, etc. Encourage the youngsters to watch/observe, draw, document, and perhaps even measure what these green neighbors are doing. What other living beings are interacting with them (positively or negatively)? How are they changing and growing over time and in different weather conditions? Please make sure that the children understand that these green beings are alive – something that some of the youngest might not actually realize.
Once everyone has at least the beginning of a multi-sensorial, imaginative, real-time acquaintance with these fellow creatures, you can all begin to talk and read about photosynthesis and roots and seeds, etc. (scientific function and form). At the same time, I hope that you’ll all continue to interact and care for those plant citizens (as mentioned earlier) whether they’re in the school garden, the classroom, or in nearby natural areas. Reading stories and poems about plants is vital too. Ancient myths from around the world are especially helpful. Discussions about the plants that we eat (directly or indirectly) and / or other plants that provide us with fiber, medicines, building materials, fuel for heating, fragrances, etc. are all illuminating and important endeavors.
Acknowledging this, the following little art project and subsequent, complementary, active, outdoor collecting game offer even more ways to build, reinforce, and weave together children’s appreciation of the plants who sustain us – and almost all of the Earth’s other beings and food webs. This preliminary puzzle project should strengthen young people’s verbal and visual memory of the English words used to designate the key components of photosynthesis. It also underscores the role of seeds as essential, although often tiny, forms of plant life. Older students especially can begin to recognize seeds as vital carriers of many kinds of adaptive genetic information. The seeds transmit from generation to generation the choreography of chemical dances that lead to the unfolding of the plants across time. While most plants can reproduce vegetatively / asexually, seeds are an especially amazing structure essential to many kinds of land plants. How wondrous to imagine that they have been evolving for literally millions of years or to learn that photosynthesis itself has been occurring in single-celled, organisms for literally billions of years! The process of photosynthesis has been so foundational for the translation of Sun’s energy into the chemical energy that enables and empowers living beings – i.e. so much of Life here on Earth. Children deserve to learn about it in some detail!
One final consideration, this pre-game, art project intentionally invites young people to consciously consider, create, and share a variety of visual images of plants as well as abstract symbols such as words and symbols from scientific nomenclature. All of these can be used to communicate about the principal material factors of photosynthesis, factors that shape land plants’ lives and thereby our world – water, carbon dioxide, the Sun’s light, and those legacy-bearing seeds. You can also use this project to acknowledge and celebrate the many different human languages that your students probably speak by asking the older ones not just to color the pictures but to also add the words for water, carbon dioxide, sun light, and seeds in other languages as well. Invite them too to create and add their own amplifying images / pictures to each small section. By conducting the activity in this way, you can lay the groundwork for future conversations about the ways that people can use both images and abstract symbols (among other means such as spoken language) as they try to share ideas with one another. Significantly, drawing, and, later, composing with other students’ artwork (see the accompanying written directions) offers the youngsters yet another path for connecting with the new information they’re gathering about photosynthesis. The trading of student-illustrated puzzle sections allows children to give and receive valued recognition for their artwork. By activating and employing multiple aspects of youngsters’ heads, hands, and hearts and providing an occasion for them to interact and provide feedback to their peers, the puzzle prompts and rewards both artwork and sociable engagement. It is our hope that the learning becomes more memorable and fun for all involved. Projects such as this can contribute significantly to children’s sense of social worth and connection – as well as to their enjoyment of the ongoing collective quest for ecological knowledge.
Here’s a sample of how a finished project might look. In this case, the four embellished components are arranged and collaged to a photograph of a deciduous forest trimmed from a calendar. By combining collages of magazine photographs of nature (or even natural materials themselves) with their colored puzzle sections or other free-hand drawings and/or paintings, children can readily generate startling and inspiring tributes to the essential ingredients of photosynthesis as it occurs among seed-bearing land plants.