This year at our tutorial, the third graders are studying science through the discoveries of plants in the world around us. If you ask our three youngest students, they will quickly tell you a botanist is a person who studies living plants, and that they are in fact themselves botanists!

Here are some of the books we’ve read and/or had in our nature table book basket the past few weeks. Some we own and some we found at our local library.

To whet their appetites this past May for an upcoming year of botany studies, I had them each pick one of our plentiful iris flowers from the bed beside our house.

Then, we took them apart piece by piece by piece. Flowers are simply miraculous! They were able to name parts as we studied the intricacy of the plant. There really isn’t a flower much more intricately made and beautiful both inside and out than the bearded iris. I personally love the purple variety, but the white ones we discovered beside our home are magnificent as well!

We spend a lot of time in the outdoors, and we have made many discoveries over the summer and since starting school the first week in August. The photo collage below is a collection of more recent pursuits including assignments for our Botany Notebook Journal and their Explorers and Inventors class at the same tutorial. Their first assignment in that class was to go an an Expedition near the home and then they answered questions about it! I LOVED this assignment as much as they did. While we explored, Li’l Miss was busy looking for stones and sticks for her home-made Tic-Tac-Toe game during Week 1 of God’s Little Explorers Preschool!

I had to snap pics of Li’l Bro’s and Li’l Miss’s Expedition reports. I took notes for them on my iPhone as we explored, and they had no trouble saying things they were seeing, hearing and discovering as we “traveled” on our journey!

We had an elementary science class last year at the tutorial that I think NO ONE liked, and we are SO HAPPY to be back to studying science with Apologia from elementary classes to high school classes. Here are some close-ups of the 3rd graders working on their journal pages. It was fun for them to use photos I printed out from their gardening this past summer. Li’l Bro used photos of his bean plants and an actual bean pod, while Li’l Miss used photos from her watermelon plants and some seeds!

After working on our journaling, we read about different plants have different types of seeds. Some have “containers” like an apple tree has a fruit (the apple) and some don’t have seed containers like the magnolia tree and the pine tree, which have “cones” and are coniferous.

Then we took the Gator out and rode around the property to look for ferns, mosses and lichens, which we found plenty of way back on the property next door we get to borrow anytime we want #soblessed.

This blurry photo is included because we found all three in one spot: lichens on the side of the trunk, moss growing along the bottom, and ferns in the foreground!

During the Labor Day Holiday, we went camping and saw a biome we had never experienced before: Reelfoot Lake, which is a wetland swamp in upper northwestern Tennessee created by an earthquake in the 1800s.

We saw cypress trees growing in the water, which was a new nature discovery for us!

While walking around the yard the other day, my littles made a surprise discovery of this beautiful flower on a plant in our garden.

Does anyone know what plant this flower grows on?