Strawberry Trees and Banana Bushes
I've never really had the 'where does fruit grow or come from' discussion with K. We drive past cows every morning. We have had plenty of chats about meat (cows, sheep, pigs, kangaroos...) and other products that come from animals (dairy, wool etc). We don't have a vegetable garden however or fruit trees. I was reminded of this fact when a week or so ago K drew a fantastic picture of a strawberry tree.
So with K being such a huge fruit eater, we have started to talk about the different ways that fruit can grow.
We painted some fruit trees. As we didn't have any brown paint, we decided that our fruit trees could be any colour that we wanted. In hindsight, I'm not sure if this helped create the picture of reality I was trying to achieve :-)
We used cut up fruit to stamp our fruits onto the trees. K has stamped some apples and oranges onto her apple and orange tree. Next she is painting some green plants for the strawberries on the ground.
She paints the strawberry and then rolls it along the paper. It creates little circle shapes on the paper, just like the seeds on the strawberry.
Next she paints a green bush. She uses a strawberry piece to stamp red raspberries on to the bush. The whole art work is very messy to produce and we both end up with paint all over our hands.
We consider feeding the painted fruits to the dog, but decide we would rather not pick up red and green doggy doos.
During the week we have talked quite a bit about strawberry plants and fruits that grow on trees.
We discussed what plants need to survive - soil, sun, water and air.
And we started to talk about other types of ways in which food grow - bushes, vines and under the ground.
This is our fruit salad tree we made last night. We also have a pash-wi-ape vine (passion fruit, kiwi and grape) and a clever bush that grows blackberries, blueberries and raspberries.
We have a little pot of strawberry seeds we need to get around to planting, and a while ago planted some carrots in a pot. I have no idea if carrots will grow in a pot, but I wasn't prepared to put some love and effort into a garden bed that Natti the puppy would have great delight in destroying in the blink of an eye.
I have to remember to plan a greater amount of time when doing the grocery shopping int he future, instead of being in a great rush. This will give us more time to examine the various fruits for sale and talk about the type of plant upon which they have grown. I also need to do a bit of research myself. I admit to having to quickly look up kiwi fruit on the computer lasy night before deciding where this little picture should be glued.
