March 4 H Nature Seekers Meeting

I had decided we would try to have as many meetings outside as possible, if the weather cooperates. After all the rain we had last week I wasn't sure what Monday would end up bringing, but the forecast looked good.  It was a beautiful day!  It ended up being in the low 80's with a slight breeze blowing. Perfect weather for our meeting!

This month I thought we would do something on seeds.  We only had an hour for the meeting because I had to have the girls to gymnastics on time, but an hour long meeting is a pretty good amount of time.  I had four activities planned because I wasn't sure how long each would take and I wanted the meeting to take the full hour, but we never got to the last activity.

First we talked about seeds, what they were, why they were important, and how they are planted besides an actual person planting them.  Then we did a seed ID activity.

I had put 10 different types of seeds in ziplock bags and numbered them 1 to 10.  I made 10 labels with the 10 different seeds on them.  We looked at each seed and tried to guess what it was and put the label beside each bag ( I had also written an answer key so I would remember!)  The children did really well.  They got 4 wrong but the ones they got wrong were easy to mistake for the other (cantaloupe and squash, carrot and basil.)

Next we did a garden in a glove activity.  I will talk more about this in detail in another post because I got the idea from my monthly homeschool science camp kit that Monsanto has been sending me each month.  The idea is to use a glove to act as a greenhouse and get your seeds to germinate.  We put a damp cotton ball in each finger of the glove, placed the seeds on top, and another damp cotton ball on top of the seeds.  The fingers were labeled with the type of seed.  Then we blew some air into the glove and used a pip cleaner to tie it closed.  The glove needs to be hung in a sunny place and is supposed to germinate in 3-5 days.  The hardest part of this was getting the seeds in the fingers of the glove.

After that I had them paint clay pots.  I found small clay pots at Dollar Tree 3 for $1.  They were really cute!  Each child painted their pot then took some dirt and a sunflower seed and planted it inside.

Emmie is now old enough to officially be a Cloverbud!

I thought it was a fun meeting and the children seemed to enjoy themselves.  I had 9 children at this meeting.  Next month we are going to do something on photography.