Roots and Leaves

We're studying plants this week in Science. The kids were happy to move on to something a little more tasty..haha! I set a sweet potato up to show the kids how it is a root and will sprout if given long enough. It has grown a few great sprouts, but hasn't started putting out vines yet. We started it a couple of weeks ago so it would be sprouting by the time we studied roots. We've enjoyed watching it and look forward to seeing it grow something green!

On Tuesday, we had carrots and sweet potatoes for our "root" meal. Carter loves carrots anyway but hasn't had a lot of sweet potatoes. Jeff was upset that I didn't make my sweet potato casserole, but I wanted a dish that I could put both of the roots into. I cooked them slowly with porkchops and maple syrup along with some other seasonings. It overcooked a little while waiting for the boys to finish up with karate but still tasted pretty good...not our favorite. It probably would have been better with ham. Yesterday, we went outside to find samples of some of the roots and leaves that we've been studying. I gave each one of them two notecards with a description written on them. They each had to find what I had written on their cards. There's not a lot of green outside right now, so I was a little worried about finding everything. We did find everything on our cards, even though one of them was brown! We sorted everything and taped them to the note cards. I think they learned more through that process than they did actually looking for the stuff. Now that we've studied the different types of roots and leaves, it will be fun to quiz them on it next time we go camping. Of course, we'll have to be careful with Madison and her tendency to get poison ivy!! I actually didn't let her touch very much of the green stuff yesterday...all she has to do is walk past it! I'm not sure how she survived camping the last time!