Crazy with Carnivorous Plants Camp Day
Welcome to our “Fun with Flower Power! – An Amazing DIY Plants Camp Week” series. For Day 4 of our camp week, we focused on oh so interesting carnivorous plants! Read on for ideas on themed ideas on crafts, links to educational and interactive games, food snacks, and experiments!
A TYPICAL DAY
All kids are different and you can definitely vary your day with whatever works for you 🙂 But the gist of our day having our kiddos focus on some work books or online learning tools in the early morning, an intro to the day’s theme after they were done, some videos around lunch time, and themed activities (reading time, writing time, crafts, food crafts/snacks, and games or experiments) in the afternoon. Feel free to pick and choose whatever works for you 🙂
INTRO
Carnivorous plants were a bit like mythical creatures in our household – something they knew vaguely about but couldn’t name any facts or describe how they worked. So the day was definitely filled with new things to learn! For our intro, we visited a page on easyscienceforkids: Fun Facts About Venus Flytrap which contained a brief video (note an insect does get trapped inside the Venus Flytrap, but the video is otherwise not graphic) and some facts.
WHAT TO WATCH
For our video of the day, we let the kids pick from some carnivorous plant videos we found. While we only watched one, we’ve listed them below so you can pick as well:
- Carnivorous Plants – Dr. Binocs Show – this one is more of a cartoon but is only 4 min.
- Ryan Learns About Carnivorous Plants – this one is a 7 min video with a mix of actors and cartoon-elements.
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
For our themed-snack of the day, we created ‘venus fly traps’ out of green apples and some almond slices. We also used candy eyes for the eyes.
For the ‘simpler venus fly trap apple’, the almond was actually a flying insect which was eventually trapped by the carnivorous plant….
We also created a Venus Fly Trap watermelon by slicing a chunk out and adding some “apple teeth”. Just for fun we added googly eyes 🙂
READING
It’s no secret that reading helps prevent that summer slide. Some even say this is the most important. For our book of the day, we picked a Level 4 Nonfiction book on carnivorous plants. If you’ve got an older child, you can also have them fill out a book report or write out some interesting facts they’ve learned.
- Hungry Plants by Mary Batten
WRITING & WRITING PROMPTS
Just like reading, writing helps prevent that summer slide by both encouraging their creativity but also their motor skills and penmanship.
If you’ve got a little one, have them trace words related to the theme: PLANT, HUNGRY, VENUS FLY TRAP
If you’ve got older children, have them write a sentence or two up to a page or two (depending on their age). Encourage them to be creative AND give reasons for why they made certain choices.
- If you were a bee-sized superhero, would you save the bugs from being eaten by the venus fly trap? If so, how would you do it?
CRAFTS
For our craft of the day, we followed a paper plate one by daniellesplace.com: Venus Fly Trap Crafts & Learning Activities for Children. The one we followed was the puppet craft: Venus Flytrap Paper Plate Puppet and Toss Game, though we just created the paper puppet.
ACTIVITY
As we weren’t able to get a hold of some carnivorous plants to perform any experiments, we instead printed out a few sheets for the kids to do. We picked a few from carnivorousplants.org: Teacher Resources – Activities. There’s a handful of fun ones in there like word searches and mazes that your kids can do if they’ve already done their reading for the day.
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for checking out our at home play / summer camp guide! If you enjoyed this article, please let us know what you think in the comments below and/or follow us on Pinterest
Also, if you haven’t already, check out some of our other at home play / summer guides: DIY Summer Camps.
Happy Learning!
