While you’re exploring the topic of seeds, you might as well have yourself some fruit snacks. No, not the gummy imitation of fruit my children try to count as one of the four food groups, but actual fruit, for snacks. Instead of quickly doling out fruit slices on each child’s plate, turn snack time into science time. Take some time to examine and talk about a few fruits and their seeds.
Select a few fruits with different sized seeds: small (strawberries, kiwis), medium (apples, oranges, watermelon), large (peaches, nectarines, mangoes). Hold up each fruit, one at a time, and talk about the characteristics of the fruit, how the fruit grows and where the seeds might be. As you cut up the fruit, isolate the seeds and pass them around for the children to look at (include magnifiers if you like). Compare the sizes of the different seeds, even sort them into groups of small, medium, and large if you’ve used several samples.
You may wish to dry the seeds and tape them to a poster with pictures of your activity. Make it a matching poster by having pictures of each fruit at the top, and the dried seeds at the bottom with yarn or something else the children can use to connect the seed to the corresponding fruit. You could even try sprouting the seeds after they’ve dried. As a sweet reward, this science activity ends with a great fruit salad! This could also be a great literacy activity when combined with the book, A Fruit is a Suitcase for Seeds by Jean Richards.
Photo by sjur.