This year Josh and Nathan are both using Apologia’s elementary Botany course with our homeschool co-op.
Yes, you read that right. The mom teachers are even doing botany with the preschoolers in our co-op. So far Nathan has learned that flowers make seeds. The first week all of the kids made plant presses and put a few plants in to press at co-op. Nathan was SO PROUD of his because it had his NAME on it!

All week they have been collecting things from our yard to put in their presses because I’m sure it’s going to turn cold one of these days (if you’re reading this blog in order you’ll know that before I was able to finish this post it SNOWED… good thing I had them gather plants last week). I’m so glad we planted all of these bushes, shrubs, and plants this summer because we have LOTS of things for them to chose from right here in our own yard.

I know the east coast is supposed to be where everyone goes to see pretty fall colors, but honestly I think we have some very nice color here in our own yard this time of the year as well.

Of course Josh wasn’t able to reach the leaf he wanted just by reaching into the tree. NO. He had to CLIMB the tree and in the process he knocked over one of the biggest stems of my plant below….. good thing it’s close to freezing or I would be upset that he ruined my biggest one (LOL).


After the boys ran around the yard gathering all of the things they wanted to press, they laid them out on the blotting paper.

Then they tightened the straps on each of their plant presses. You can see how full the presses are. They would like to put a few more things in them, but first we need to get some of our other botany things caught up. If we have time we can always cut some more card board and get some more blotting paper to add to the press.

Here is a picture of our dog, Casey. This seems like a good place to include a picture of her since she likes it when the kids have things to do outside.

The first day of co-op after the kids finished making their plant presses, they were served lemonade with springs of flowers frozen into ice cubes! What creative botany teachers they have!
Two weeks ago the kids learned about classification by sorting a pile of shoes.
Last week the kids made light huts and tasted the leaves of an early american plant, the Lemon Balm. Here Josh is tasting his.
We are studying Colonial Times in our Tapestry curriculum and this plant fits in perfectly! I’m so thankful the botany mom teachers know so much about plants and can so nicely tie botany into our history timeline. The Lemon Balm was grown in Colonial America! How cool is that? Each of the kids brought home their own Lemon Balm plant which you can see in this picture. They are the ones at the front of the picture. We will hopefully plant them outside if the weather ever warms up again for a week or more. For now, they’ll have to live in our light hut.

They are supposed to grow 1-2 feet high. It’s related to the mint, but isn’t as invasive. We have several co-op grandparents who help do things we moms don’t have time to do. One such thing was making all of the light huts. The kids only had to insert the lightbulbs, attach the extension cords and then make the curtain that hangs down in front. Each family then took one light hut home. Here is ours which currently has 2 bean seeds germinating in it in addition to the Lip Balm plant. We raised the cups that have the bean seeds up on tall drink cups so they are closer to the light. This is the light hut with the curtain up and the doors open.

Here you can see Nathan peeking through the air vents on the back side of the light hut.

We have a hard time getting our “curtain” to stay on so Josh is always tweaking it.
Every morning the boys like to go check on the bean seeds they have germinating. They water them and then carefully put the curtain back on and leave them alone until the next morning. We try to keep it nice and warm in the light hut so I don’t let them look in there TOO many times in a day.

First day: Planted the bean seeds at co-op. When we got home the boys placed a quarter over one of the bean seeds to see how strong the young shoots are. We’re watching to see if the sprout can actually move the quarter. Follow along:

After just a few days we started to see some green poking through:

Then it seemed like the very next day the one that wasn’t hindered by the quarter was quite tall. At 10 days it’ measures 8 inches and the bottom leaves are HUGE! The other bean seed in this cup didn’t sprout.

We’re not sure why the taller one is lagging so far behind the one in the other cup. But, we do know why the shorter one is lagging behind and that is because it had 2 quarters to push up. You can see the sprout poking up and pushing the quarters over on to their sides in this picture:

The shorter one is 3 1/2 inches tall and it’s the one that had to push the quarters out of the way. The other one is 6 1/2 inches tall. If you look close you can see the bottom leaf is sort of deformed on the shorter one. Maybe it has something to do with having to push the quarters?

One of the gals on my SHS loop posted tonight that she hasn’t done this experiment yet because she didn’t have a styrofoam cup which made me realize that I’m GLAD we didn’t use styrofoam or else we wouldn’t be able to see the roots. So, I went and quickly took a picture of the roots that you can see through the plastic cup just now so you can all see them, too.
There is one other part to botany and that is the nature journal. Here Josh is working on his journal:
He started out with a store bought journal and then decided he wanted to make his own. This is what he came up with:
He did a great job with all of his drawings from the first couple of chapters. The first assignment was to label the part of a leaf and the second one was to show the difference between vascular and nonvascular plants.

Well… I better end this blog and upload it. I can’t keep waiting until we finish “one more thing” because this is a YEAR LONG project and I don’t want to wait that long to upload what we’re doing. So, there is our first month of Botany! Thanks to the co-op we are actually doing a LOT of hands on projects this year.