This month we held our homeschool science class at the Yellowstone Gateway Museum. You never know what the weather is going to be like this time of year, so it’s nice to have an indoor option. I’m all for getting out in every weather, but it’s hard to figure out what activities to do when you don’t know if it will be 40 F and raining or 50 F and sunny.
The museum is closed during the winter/spring, so we had the whole place to ourselves. The museum has several educational trunks for educators, and we got to play with native plants.
We started out with a photosynthesis game to keep everyone moving a little while learning about how plants make food. We read a story about yarrow from A Kid’s Herb Book and looked at the yarrow sample from the trunk.
I broke the kids into groups and had them arrange cards illustrating a plant’s life cycle. For our last activity I handed out native plant samples and the kids spent some time looking closely at them and then drawing them.
After we toured around the museum a little, we went outside and played on an old caboose.
And that’s how you do native plants.
Looks fun! Identifying plants is my weakest nature skill by far. My youngest wants to take apart a Bird of Paradise to look at all the parts up close, though, so maybe he might encourage me to learn a little something.
@Debi- We should get together sometime and you can teach me about birds, and I’ll teach you plants! The Bird of Paradise dissection sounds great!