Botany, Seeds, Flowers, Pollination & Fruits

Sharing what we've been up to for Science this summer with Exploring Creation with Botany.


This is my second time through this book in my homeschool and it is one of my favorites of all the books in the Young Explorer series that we've been through so far (which is all but the newest one).

So far we are averaging about a week per unit (with a few weeks off for vacation and summer camps), so we need a good 6 more weeks of summer to finish if we stay on track. 

We are using the printable notebooking pages available in the Extras link mentioned in the book. 

Here's what we've been up to. . . 

Lesson 1: Intro to Botany, Taxonomy, Angiosperms, Gymnosperms, Seedless Vascular and Nonvascular Plants


Classifying shoes



Notebooking


Building a light hut


Growing seedlings


Designing a notebook cover


Notebooking for Lesson 1


Lesson 2: Seeds, Monocots & Dicots


Examining a been seed embryo




Labeling the parts of a seed



Learning about seeds


and finding unusual seed coats. 


Creating our own seeds and plants they grow into: "The Bee Plant" and "The Creeping Vinebury"


Doing experiments




Writing up lab reports a.k.a. scientific speculation sheets


Learning about monocots and dicots




Finding examples of monocots


and dicots


Witnessing the start of a strawberry, which led nicely into our next lesson

Lesson 3: Flowers


Dissecting a flower



Naming flower parts


Labeling flower parts


Labeling a flower



Creating flowers ~ the Lion Plant and the Firefly Plant - the flowers light up like fireflies :) 

Lesson 4: Pollination


Learning about pollinators 


We studied butterflies in more depth for Bo's row of Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?


Learning about seed dispersal


Learning about human seed dispersal :) 







And animal dispersal

Lesson 5: Fruits


Counting seeds for a spiritual application



Learning one seed produces many seeds, so plant those seeds!


Learning all about fruits.

We are off to a good start on Lesson 6 so I hope to catch up this week and finish leaves and start roots. Then we're off to stems, trees, and gymnosperms! 

You may have noticed that some of our learning tied in nicely with our row of The Carrot Seed. Love that! 

Hope you are having a great summer! Wish I could say I'd be back with some great back-to-school posts, but I can't. We are still very much in summer mode and will be through the month of August.

9 comments

  1. It was fun to see all your pictures! We're starting back to school tomorrow, adding a few new subjects each week. Figured it was a good idea to get things moving as baby is due the end of Oct/beginning of Nov. and we'll take a break then that may last through Christmas. My 5th grade and under crowd will be starting off with plants so this is great to give me some ideas. (We'll be using God's Design for Science: The World of Plants but I also have Apologia's Botany book that the 4th and 5th grader can pull out to go further when they wish.) Makayla elected to start One Year Adventure Novel this week instead of Apologia's Biology so she and I will dive into that. Kids are starting their first assigned literature for the year, each reading a biography. And we're picking up All About Reading Level 1 where we left off with Oliver earlier this summer - so that should be fun.

    Enjoy August!

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  2. Looks awesome. We really enjoyed working through Flying Creatures... :) I love the notebooking pages you guys did! :) Are you jumping back into Heart of Dakota in the Fall or have you changed directions? We are going to start back in to HOD in Sept... but for the Summer, we've been enjoying some nature studies and FIAR. :) xo Hope your summer is going well - looks like it is! Love, Cass @ TheUnpluggedFamily

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    1. Thanks, Cass! We will continue on with much of Bigger Hearts - the history with Sonlight D&E books added in, and we'll read the science books for sure - they are great, but I don't care for the science (as is) in Bigger. We did Botany this summer so we can do more nature study this year and just enjoy those books! Excited! (P.S. I meant to email this but don't have your email anymore. I'll post my question that I had for you on your blog.) :)

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  3. Love this! It brings back so many great memories :) This course really is so suited for spring and summer. We did it through the winter and spring and made it work, but I can see though your experiences there would have been so much more fun to be had later on in the year. I'm still so glad we did it. So fun!

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    1. Yes, it's still great to do anytime. There are even a few winter activities. I'm glad you did it too, Tara - I was inspired to do it again! :)

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  4. This brings back a flood of memories. I remember having shoes all over the family room as the girls sorted them out. I always am intrigued to see how everyone uses the same curriculum and how different & similar our learning days look.

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    1. It brought back memories for me too - of doing this with my older boys. In fact, we pulled out the older boys journals almost every notebooking lesson to see what they wrote. The younger kids loved it. (But, I made my boys do a lot more notebooking and projects! I was much more relaxed this time doing it in a shorter amount of time).

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  5. I a curious at what age you recommend starting Apologia? We use MFW, and are on our way to starting 1st grade. I think this program looks so interesting, but I don't believe MFW includes it until 7th grade. I've wondered if starting Apologia earlier as the core science program would be a good idea. That way we could fit in more topics. I'm probably way ahead of myself and should just take the curriculum as it comes ;) Also, I'm so curious where you live! You have such amazing photos of all the nature walks and experiments! Maybe I just need to look harder.

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    1. Hi Molly,

      I've started as young as 6. The Junior Journals have less writing and use primary lines to include younger ages. The regular journals have regular lines for older students. So any elementary age can use them. But, Astronomy may be the easiest book to start with. For younger ones, I often wrote their narrations for them to start. I remember when my youngest at the time decided he was ready to write his own narrations - he was about 7. You could also write or type your student's narration and have them write it in their journal as copywork.

      All of my nature photos for Botany were taken in South-Central Montana and North-Central Wyoming. The photos in this post were taken at our place in Montana. We have 22 acres of forest land near the Beartooth mountains, which is about a 3 hour drive from where we live in Wyoming. :)

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