Sunday, March 9, 2008

Free Mini Lesson on Cattails

Over the past few weeks we have been participating in a wonderful Green Hour Challenge hosted by Barb at The Heart of Harmony. Our family has been heading outdoors on a regular basis to discover the wonderful world around us.

Part of this challenge is to take short walks with my children. During a couple different outings we have seen a plant that is pretty familiar to our family: The Cattail. The kids have grown up seeing this plant at Grandma and Grandpa's house, but we never knew much about it. When we returned home from one of our walks, we decided to take a closer look at this marvelous plant.

I created a mini lesson on Cattails for my children and want to share it. It includes a notebooking page where you label the parts of a cattail, as well as a few lines for other information, such as, where you would find them at, how big they get, etc.

There is also a section where you can fill in the blank with the many interesting facts about the uses of the Cattail plant. It is amazing what folks over the years have done with this plant. For example, the Native Americans used to roast the flower of the Cattail and eat it like corn on the cob. YUM... or maybe not... LOL

There are a couple links provided to help fill in the blanks on the notebook page. And with one of the links, there is a very neat science experiment using the Cattail.

CATTAIL MINI LESSON

The link can also be found underneath the Green Hour Challenge Logo on the right side bar of this blog. A picture of the notebooking page can be found in a post HERE.

Happy Nature Studying!

5 comments:

Brittney said...

You have really taken these challenges and ran with them! I love it! Your kids are truly going to remember these times with you!
Your excitement is contagious!
And thanks for the great notebooking pages and lessons...I'll be checking back!
:o) Brittney

Tami, full-time mom; part-time foodie said...

I can't wait until the snow melts and I can use this one! Thanks for generously sharing your talents!

Lisa~ said...

Just saw you on the CM carnival! *Ü* And stopped in to say howdy on my rounds...

Lisa~

Ms Eva said...

Have you tried eating cattails? When the kiddos and I dabbled in making our own maple syrup recently, my mom recalled that when I was little, she and Dad also experimented with eating cattails (my dad was all about living off the land)... she said they were good but I don't remember.

Tina in WA said...

I haven't tried eating them. I don't think I could get past the down stuff in the center. LOL

During our research we did see that the pollen is used in cooking and different parts of the plant is still used today in cooking.

It is amazing that this plant has so many uses.

~Tina