Parts of a Plant

Most parts of a plant worksheets show a cartoon flower. This one asks you to pull an actual plant out of the ground first.

That single change does something. The child holds roots that are muddy and tangled and nothing like the neat lines in a textbook, and the labelling that follows means something. It also produces the question we hear every time, which is why the roots are so much bigger than expected.

Use a weed. Anything with a decent root system that nobody will miss. Wash it, lay it on newspaper, then label.

The sheet has the labelling frame, the four terms, and a second box for the child to draw what surprised them. That second box is the one that matters. Grade one children write things in it that tell you exactly how much they understood.