Seed Project at Trinity
The Hudson Park Children’s Greenhouse (HPCG) programming committee provided a four week first grade seed unit at Trinity Elementary School. Naomi Towers led the sessions, with assistance from Joyce Kent, Steve Nakashima and others. Prior to beginning the program HPCG met with the teachers and principal.
In the first classroom session, Naomi started with ‘What is a seed?’ and showed illustrations of seed cross sections. The children dissected seeds and ‘found the baby plant’ inside, using hand lenses, toothpicks, soaked kidney beans and toothpicks. In the second classroom session Naomi had the children assemble soaked seeds into Ziploc bags with paper towels. They hung the Ziploc bags on the windows of the classroom. The students sketched predictions of what would happen.
Two weeks later and for classroom session three, the students shared what happened to the seeds in the seed bags. Then using cucumbers, green peppers, tomatoes and other vegetables the students harvested seeds. In the fourth and last session Naomi read From Seed to Pumpkin to the class. The students then extracted seeds from a pre-cut pumpkin and learned about the life cycle of a pumpkin. It was a wonderful project and was well received by the teachers and students.