"R" Controlled Vowel Flowers and Stems

I actually got this idea from another fabulous blogger - Lita Lita over at Learning in Spain.  She used it with her kiddos to practice verb endings in Spanish- which I am most def. going to have to do in the future as well! But since we were focusing on "R" controlled vowels with my intervention group this week- I just could not wait to try it out! I figured it would work equally as well for this activity- and it was a hit! Now the kids have a spring timey resource to use for helping to remember those tricky "r" patterns!

The kids wrote all of the patterns on the leaves and words on the petals in pencil first. Then they went back and traced each pattern with a different color marker and traced the words that contained that pattern with the corresponding color!

As if this wasn't enough plant fun for one day...we also started our investigations of stems today!

Enter celery, food coloring, and water.

I am sure some of you are already familiar with this one- and if not it is seriously such an easy way to show kids how water travels through the stem to other parts of the plant. Not to mention, my kids are always shocked when they find out that celery is actually a stem- and we eat it!

Here is the class chart we created to go along with the investigation. Today (as the real scientists do) we made predictions/hypotheses as to what we thought would happen to the celery after it had been in the red water for a few days. Each student wrote their prediction on a post-it. Now we just have to wait and see so that we can fill out the "what happened" side....the suspense is killing them!

Keep linkin up your great Cinco de Mayo ideas! It'll be here before ya know it!