Home Geography for Primary Grades · Lesson XXIX · Unit 7: Plants
29. Useful vegetables
Goal: Your child sorts vegetables by the part of the plant we eat (root, leaf, seed, stem) and writes a short composition about vegetables.
You'll need
- A few real vegetables: a carrot, a lettuce or cabbage leaf, peas or beans, celery, a potato
- A dried bean, a damp paper towel and a clear jar (to sprout a seed)
- A geography notebook (any notebook kept just for these lessons) and a pencil
What's in the book
A short verse about a little plant asleep in a seed, woken by the sunshine and rain, with pictures of a sprout and a young vine. Questions: what vegetables grow nearby, which are eaten as roots, leaves, seeds or stems, the potato, and how potatoes are planted. The answers are to be written as a little composition.
The lesson, step by step
The sleeping plant
Read the verse aloud.
In the heart of a seed buried deep, so deep,
A dear little plant lay fast asleep.
Ask: What woke the little plant? (the sunshine and the rain)
Sprout a seed
Fold a damp paper towel inside a clear jar and slip a dried bean between the towel and the glass. Keep the towel damp. In a few days, watch it sprout, as in the book's picture.
Sort the vegetables
Lay out the vegetables. Ask the book's questions: Which do we eat as roots? As leaves? As seeds? As stems or stalks? Make four piles.
The potato
Ask: Which is the most useful garden vegetable? The book says the potato.
Show the "eyes" on a potato. Say: Farmers plant pieces of potato, each with an eye, and a new plant grows from each eye.
What grows here?
Ask: What vegetables grow in our neighborhood, in gardens or on farms nearby? If you can, visit a garden or farm market.
Write a little composition
The book says:
Answer the questions in writing so as to make a little composition about vegetables.
Your child writes three to five sentences, for example: "Carrots and beets are roots. We eat the leaves of lettuce."
Afterwards
Watch the bean sprout each day and draw it every other day in the notebook.
Answers to the book's problems
Roots: carrots, beets, turnips, radishes, sweet potatoes. Leaves: lettuce, cabbage, spinach. Seeds: peas, beans, corn. Stems or stalks: celery, asparagus, rhubarb. A potato is really a swollen underground stem (that is why it has eyes, which are buds). The book calls the potato the most useful common garden vegetable. Potatoes are planted by cutting them into pieces, each with an eye or two, and burying them in the soil; each eye grows into a new plant.
Worked out for this site from the scan. If a number in your copy differs, trust the book.