Botany Nomenclature
Botany Nomenclature
When introducing botany to the children, one must remember the most important aids to learning will be their activites, observations, and experiences. The children already have a base of knowledge from their first hand experince with plants. The nomenclature material should be a small part of the child's work. The children have already encountered botany nomenclature in the primary class through their work tracing and learning the names of various leaf shapes as well as the booklets on the parts of the plant, leaf, flower, root, and stem. With these booklets, the children matched the pictures with text cards and had the opportunity to recreate these booklets in their own hand.
In the elementary, the work is extended. The children have an initial lesson on the needs of the plant, and extensive lessons on all its parts. These lessons focus on the main functions of these parts. The botany nomenclature cards extend this work. In our classroom, we have a complete set of picture and text cards. There is a progression from the whole to the details as the child moves from the front to the back of the set. For example; the first set of the flowers will have the whole flower with its four parts, then it will take the parts of the parts: parts of the stamen, pistil, etc., then moving to other characteristics of the flower. All of the characteristics that were introduced in the classroom for each of the parts are those that are used for scientific classification. They too are placed near the beginning of the set. Each of the sections is devoted to one aspect of the plant: plant, leaf, flower, stem, root, and mushroom.
Later works include the scientific classification of plants. The children use their information to classify according to the botanical standards.