How does your garden grow?

As many of you know, we have decided to homeschool Bella, and later, Abby.  I used this past school year as a "practice year" for kindergarten, as homeschooling is a completely new journey both for me as a teacher and for Bella as a student.  She has done extremely well.  She is now a beginning reader, and just as importantly, she loves to be read to.  She frequently asks me to read to her while she is eating lunch and I am happy to oblige!  We finished a kindergarten math book (Saxon Math K) and she really enjoyed it, especially the manipulatives.  We have also almost completed Book 1 of Explode the Code.

I decided that a unit study would be a good, fun way to end our year.  Since planting season is upon us, I picked a Garden unit study.  I purchased and downloaded a unit study by Amanda Bennett to use as a guide, and off we went!

We have had such a good time with this! I have been able to incorporate reading, writing, art, science, and Bible all into this unit.  We learned about Claude Monet and looked at several examples of his artwork.  In the picture below, we are attempting to paint like Monet...we had fun, but I'm not sure it turned out quite as good as the original!

 We also learned some new vocabulary words, such as: row, dig, stem, etc.  I had Bella copy these into her Garden Journal, then I wrote the definition she gave me for each one!  We also made a garden collage out of magazine clippings, talked about the differences between fruit and vegetables, and made a flower out of pattern blocks.  For a Bible lesson, we read the parable about "A sower went forth to sow" out of the book of Matthew, and we talked about having "good ground" for the seed of God to grow!

                And of course, at the end of all this, we planted some seeds!  Bella chose tomoatoes, squash, broccoli, beans , and carrots.

                                     Abby helped plant the seeds!

 
                              Just a few short days later, we were excited to see our seeds sprout!

                             My sweet Daddy plowed us a real garden!

                   But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who has ears to hear, let him hear."  Matthew 13:8-9