The NC for Year 1 Science suggests children should know the main parts of trees and plants, so I decided rather than simply labelling a pre-printed diagram we could draw the pictures ourselves to label. These were both done as follow ups after looking at plants and trees at the park, allotments, Botanical Gardens etc. in person and physically exploring the different parts. You'll also notice the large gap in the dates they were done, too. 😗
We did the drawings as a copying exercise, but if your children are more artistically inclined you could probably get them to draw the diagrams themselves from a photo? Mine aren't (lol) so we did it step by step. On a piece of scrap A4, I drew each part of the plant/tree one thing at a time for them to copy onto their own paper, i.e.
For the tree:
1) grass
2) trunk
3) branches
4) leaves
5) roots
6) fruit
7) blossoms
For the plant:
1) grass
2) stem
3) flower
4) leaves
5) roots
6) fruit
They tried to name each thing as we went along but I neither confirmed nor corrected them at this point. 😊
When the drawings were done and while they were colouring them in, I wrote a list of words they needed to use as labels on the whiteboard.
We worked through the words together one by one, starting with the obvious ones at their choice. I modelled how to draw labels on my own drawing but they were free to place their own labels wherever they wanted on the picture - as long as it made sense and wasn't, for example, on the opposite side of the page! As they added the labels we recapped some of the things we knew about each thing, e.g. roots help keep the plant steady in the ground and drink up water, etc.
For the plant labels, the NC states children should know what a flower is and what petals are. I included the term "pistil" simply because I knew otherwise my girls would want to know why only the outside of a flower was labelled and not the centre. 😅 The details of male/female parts and exactly what comprises the centre of a flower can wait until later years though!
