Parts of a Plant

A tall flowering plant fills the left of this 1st grade page, growing from a box of soil with its roots drawn underground. It has a white flower at the top, four leaves up the stem and a green pod hanging from the side with four dark seeds inside. Six orange numbered tags point to parts of it with thin lines, each ending in a small ring. A word bank across the top holds six words, seed, leaf, stem, fruit, roots and flower, and six numbered lines on the right wait for the names. On the sheet shown tag 1 points to the roots, 3 to the stem, 4 to a petal of the flower and 6 to a leaf, while 2 and 5 both land on the pod.

Naming the parts is the first step in the first grade science idea that a plant's structures help it live and grow; a later face asks what each part does. The pod is the part to slow down on. It is the fruit of the plant, and the round things inside it are the seeds, so tag 2 rings the empty top end of the pod, above the seeds, and tag 5 rings one seed in the row. Ask children to say what each ring sits on before they write: the pod wall is the fruit, the dark ball is a seed.

One sheet, six tags, six names. Roots is plural and leaf singular because that is how the diagram shows them. A real plant on the windowsill makes the best companion, since children can find the same parts on it. This is the base page of the plants family; its faces cover what plants need, the seed-to-plant cycle, the parts we eat, the job of each part and the parts of a flower. In NGSS terms it supports 1-LS1-1.