Preschool Botany: A Matching Language Activity with Seeds

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Young kids are ripe for science activities. This preschool botany seed matching activity is a great example.

Think about where you and your kids were a year ago. This time last year my son was letting me know that he was interested in How a Seed Grows. This year, we've moved forward in exploring preschool botany. Montessori Print Shop offers these LOVELY FREE Seed to Plant matching cards. So today I printed these preschool botany cards out, mounted the cards on green card stock (Montessori's color code for Botany materials) and laminated away. I am not a huge fan of using cards with younger kids, especially when introducing an activity. Younger kids, especially, need concrete materials. So, in order to introduce this work, I pulled out some seeds to explore the texture, color, size and smell.

Preschool Botany Seed Matching Activity

I prepared the cards as I mentioned above and then used a muffin baking pan to hold the seeds. You can use anything really. Initially I wanted to use one seed to explore but some of the seeds (e.g. flax and sesame) are quite small so that made it difficult.

Children can relate to many of the plants represented in the card set. Sunflowers are a favorite of my older son. He was amazed that the seed could grow into such a big, beautiful flower AND that we can eat the seed. Flax seeds are a bit more abstract. Mustard seeds and pumpkin seeds also caused quite the stir with my two boys. I could just see their minds going a mile a minute trying to wrap around the concept of a seed growing into a plant and then into food that we have in our home.

Then we took time exploring the seeds' textures, size, smells, shape and colors. My sons were mostly engaged with the relative sizes of the seeds. Some are quite big and some are tiny.

Then onto my favorite very spontaneous part of the activity: we decided to “plant” one of each seed to observe the growth. How do they differ? Which grows faster? Longer?