Getting Creative With Seeds

Today, it all started with cress heads. Elizabeth's request. I duly liberated some egg shells and here they are, waiting to grow:

I helped Sebastian to draw a face on his, and put his wet cotton wool inside, ready for the cress seeds but when I looked away for a moment, he had completely crushed his shell.  Oh well. The girls are very excited about theirs.

Growing cress made me think about other seed sprouts so I dug out some pinto beans, black turtle beans, lentils and chick peas, which is what you can see soaking in the pots behind the dinosaur (cool card that my mum made). We're all going to make some pulse sprouts to eat, so they're soaking overnight, then we'll rinse them and tip off the excess water daily, until roots and shoots appear.

Having the lovely coloured pulses out made me think of doing a collage with them all, so I rooted out some extras - yellow split peas, green split peas, barley, red lentils etc to give the children a range of colours to work with, on black card, with PVA.

Sebastian was very keen. And very messy. I tried to ignore the sound of falling seeds in all directions. Thank goodness Seymour bought that Dustbuster.

Francesca thought she would draw an actual picture. She thought of a rabbit and gave it features of black beans, ears of yellow peas and a body of red lentils. She used barley for the tail.

Elizabeth decided to make a leopard with yellow and black spots.

Aw, bless 'em.

Elizabeth was very pleased with her work.

Francesca complained (even, nearly cried!) because it was Too Hard!! She was trying to sort individual colours from a mixture. I gave her a pot of just red lentils and encouraged her to squirt large quantities of glue directly onto the page and suddenly it was all better. Until she realised that the back legs were so fat there wasn't really room for the front legs(!) Such a perfectionist :)

Sebastian demanded more and more glue and more and more pulses until I had had enough of the mess and cleaned him up. He seems to have had fun.

Later, I made varnish from diluted PVA and Francesca varnished her rabbit. It's not drying particularly shiny so perhaps my varnish was too thin and/or we need more coats.

Just for the record. Elizabeth's:

Francesca's: (the varnish puddles are not yet dry)

And, to continue our pulses experience, I've left some soaking overnight to make into soup tomorrow.