Teacher’s Guide: Botany on Your Plate – an outreach presentation
Grade Levels 1 – 2; Program Length 40 minutes.
Program Description:
Docents will visit your classroom with a collection of nutritious roots, stems, leaves,
flowers, fruit, and seeds/ nuts. Students will see, touch, and smell as they learn about
healthy eating and the function of each plant part. Teachers may request to keep the
vegetables for class use including tastings.
Program Objectives:
o Convey the essential role of plants and their diverse uses.
o Explore the function of each plant part using fresh fruits and vegetables to experience.
o Generate enthusiasm for eating a variety of colorful, nutritious vegetables.
o Provide curriculum materials for teacher’s future use.
Classroom Set-up:
Please provide an empty table for the display of a poster and the plants docents will show
during the presentation. Ideally, the children’s chairs would be arranged in a semi-circle
near the table.
Concepts:
o Plants produce the oxygen people and animals breathe.
Without plants, there would be no people on Earth!
o Only plants can make food (sugars and starches) inside
their bodies.
o Plant parts come in many different shapes, sizes, and
colors.
o Plants may store the food they make in their roots, stems,
or leaves (e.g., carrots and beets store food in their roots,
asparagus stores food in its stem, and spinach stores food
in its leaves). People and animals eat the part of the plant
where food is stored.
o Not all plant parts are edible. (e.g., potatoes are edible, but
potato leaves are poisonous).
Teacher’s Guide: Botany on Your Plate
Outreach version 9/12
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o Any part of a plant containing seeds is a fruit. This includes apples and oranges, but
also pea pods, tomatoes, and pumpkins!
o People should eat a rainbow of plant colors every day to be healthy and strong.
Suggested Classroom Activities: See books Botany on Your Plate and How Nature
Works for additional ideas.
o Examine taste buds with a mirror. Sample foods that are sweet, bitter, sour, and salty,
for example: agave sweetener or honey, unsweetened cocoa, a lemon slice, and a
potato chip. Taste again with your nose pinched closed. Without your sense of smell
can you taste the difference between an onion and an apple?
o Grow a variety of seedlings up against glass to observe root development.
o Dissect flowers; cut-open fruit; examine plant parts under magnification.
o Press plant and flower specimens; dry, mount on paper, and label.
o Find old flower parts (e.g. stamens) on fruits such as apples and pomegranates.
o Do bark or leaf rubbings. Identify and label.
o Research favorite edible plants and their pollinators. Draw pictures with captions.
Create individual booklets or collect work into a class book.
o Write poems about nature to be read aloud.
Recommended Resources:
o University of California Botanical Garden. 200 Centennial Drive, Berkeley.
www.botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu Offers docent-led tours, public programs, and a
store with books and plants that are ideal for classrooms or school gardens (e.g.,
butterfly attractors, cacti, CA natives, carnivorous plants, and small trees in pots).
o Lawrence Hall of Science. Centennial Drive, Berkeley.
www.lawrencehallofscience.org Offers exhibits, activities, and a store with
science/nature-themed books, games and other educational materials.
Books (May be available in the UCBG store.):
o Barrett, Katharine D. Botany on Your Plate: Investigating the Plants We Eat.
National Gardening Association, Inc., 2008. This curriculum for grades K-4 weaves
nutritional health, mathematics, language arts, and social studies together with
investigative science. Students will explore, taste, and study edible roots, stems,
leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds.
o Burnie, David. How Nature Works. Pleasantville, New York: The Reader’s Digest
Association, Inc. 1991.
Children’s Books:
o Eagen, Rachel. The Biography of Bananas. New York: Crabtree Publishing, 2006.
o Forsyth, Adrian. How Monkeys Make Chocolate: Foods and Medicines from the
Rainforests. Owl Books, 1995.
Teacher’s Guide: Botany on Your Plate
Outreach version 9/12
2 of 2