Planting Bean Seeds to Welcome Spring

Inside: Mark the beginning of the new season, by planting bean seeds and discover books and explorations you can do around this experience.

Hello Spring!

Spring began this week (yippee!) and my favorite way to welcome the season is by planting bean seeds. They are always a huge hit!

It’s still winter weather outside our window, but at least we can create some green and growing things on the inside!

Observing Bean Seeds

To begin, I soaked some dry beans for 6-8 hours at room temperature. Once they had softened, I gave one to each child to split open. I Invited them to remove the seed case, split the seed in half and search for the parts of the plant on the inside.

We labeled the parts of the bean plant inside our Bean Seed Journals (see more about these below) and colored pictures to show the stages of growth that we could expect to see as our plants grew and changed.

Planting Bean Seeds

We then used the remaining bean seeds for planting. Each child filled a cup with soil and was shown how to poke their finger inside the dirt to make a little hole for the seed.

We placed the seeds in the window and the children watered their plant each morning as they arrived.

Using Our Bean Seed Journal

To document our experience, we used a Bean Plant Journal to record our predictions on how many days it would take for the seeds to sprout, as well as observe and record the bean plant’s growth on 3 separate occasions.

With each observation, we circled the stage of growth for our own plant, which allowed us to see that even though we all planted the seeds on the same day, they were growing at different rates.

Reading About Planting Bean Seeds

While we waited for our bean seeds to sprout, we read some fun books about bean plants, such as Jack and the Beanstalk and Jasper’s Beanstalk by Nick Butterworth, which makes a fun connection to the traditional tale.

We also made Jack and the Beanstalk Story Maps that we could use to retell the story to our book buddies and then families at home.

We then read some nonfiction storybooks that further illustrated the life cycle of the bean plant such as Green Bean! Grean Bean! by Patricia Thomas and One Bean by Anne Rockwell.

And we watched this cool time lapse video of a bean seed growing!

Bean Seed Center Explorations

At the science center, I put out some dried beans for kids to explore. These can be great for sorting, counting, measuring volume or just to free explore in a sensory bin or Take-Apart Tub.

At the art center, I put out a set of Spring Mosaic Mats, so they could create bean seed pictures. In addition to being a fun art activity, it’s great for strengthening fine motor muscles.

From Bean Seeds to Bean Plants

Once the bean seeds had grown into plants, the children were excited to take them home and share them with families along with their Bean Seed Journals.

Before doing so, we colored and cut out a storybook castle and put it on a stick for our beanstalk to wrap around. We used the one found in the Jack and the Beanstalk Story Map, but kids can also get creative and draw their own castles. Much thanks to Wonders Of Kindergarten for sharing this really fun idea.