STEAM Invitation: How does your garden grow?

Spring inspires a lot of wonderful activities with the beautiful weather allowing more outdoor exploration, the flowers gifting us with beautiful fragrances and the wildlife parading their magnificence. 

I've been planning some life cycle study for Audrey and came up with this project idea for a STEAM life cycle of a plant, that involves a wide variety of mixed media and allows multiple levels of invitation for the children to create each part of the overall invitation. 

1. Flower creation - for this step, I set out some A4 pieces of paper cut in half for Audrey and Lacey with markers, watercolour paint, oil pastels, crayons, pencils and paper. They created one flower with each of these which we then cut out and laminated. (*EDIT* I no longer use a laminator and would not do that any more) 





2. Seeds - Using some polymer clay, Audrey and Lacey created their own little seeds and sprouting seeds. I baked it in the oven for them and we let them cool aside for when we came back to the project. 


3. Growing plant - For the phase of our plant growing from a sprouting seed into a flower, we used green pipe cleaners. They twisted them around at the top to their liking. 



I made some home made play dough using a recipe I got from a wonderful kids science book a while ago and added some lavender essential oil to also help make it a calming exercise as well as setting the scene with some beautiful floral fragrance. 



Now we had all of our components made, we went over the life cycle of a plant on their chalk board. After we discussed how a plant grows from a seed they were able to go to their invitation to build their flower garden. 


A got our her 'dirt' play dough and spread it across her wood slice. Then planted some seeds and left one on top for the step, planted her sprouting seeds, added her growing plant followed by her flowers. Then she added some 'grass' playdough. 







Afterwards both A and L had some free play with the components creating more different gardens.



This was even more fun being outdoors with the sounds of the breeze through the leaves, playing music with our chimes, the buzz of the bees in our tree and the bird's chirps surrounding our backyard. 

Enjoy and if you give it a go, please tag me @deerandfawns I'd love to see! 

-M 🌏✌️

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