Winter’s Promise Science Adventure -September

Winter Promise advertises Shoot & Sprout, Buzz & Bite as "Spend a year exploring the living things that populate our planet. Wonderful pictures will make the journey come to life as you see this world up close! Fantastic resources allow students to learn by observation and simple experiments. This program can be completed in 2-5 hours per week." So far the program lives up to it that claim.

The program has enough structure that I do not have to pull together material for science which often leads to delays a loss of student interest. The support books remind me of Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia. The e-books are wonderful full color guides to interesting and up to date websites. The only drawback is The World of Plants textbook which was just not a good fit with the rest of the program. We supplemented with a standard 3^rd Science text.

We have had a lot of fun understanding the nature of plants and growing our own balcony fall/winter garden. We have explored several local community gardens understanding the pollination and seed travel. There have been tons of cool experiments, so much so our kitchen table looks like a botany lab.

Our first experiment was the growing of a bean from seed to plant. Ironhide was beside himself because he was actually growing food. He got so into it we added kale and more beans to the lineup.