🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 🌍 Nature Literacy — Learning the names, habits, and relationships of plants, animals, and natural phenomena builds the nature literacy that connects children to the living world and lays the groundwork for environmental stewardship.
- 🔄 Flexible Thinking — When an experiment produces an unexpected result, children practice adapting their thinking — a form of cognitive flexibility that makes them more resilient learners across all subjects.
- 💬 Science Vocabulary — Science introduces children to precise vocabulary — observe, predict, hypothesis, dissolve, absorb, transparent — that dramatically expands language range and supports the academic vocabulary children need in school.
- 📝 Recording & Documentation — Drawing what they observe, recording measurements, and noting results gives children their first experience of scientific documentation — and connects science to literacy and numeracy in an authentic context.
Ever walk into a greenhouse with your preschooler and notice how warm and humid it is? Rainforests are the same way. And while watering practices and the enclosed environment have a lot to do with how warm a greenhouse is, it also has to do with the plants themselves releasing water from the leaves. With this fun and easy preschool botany experiment, your preschooler can learn about one of the big functions of a plant’s leaf—releasing water.
What your Preschooler will Learn:
The parts of a plant (stem, leaves, flower)
That leaves release water
What you Need:
A potted plant. A tropical plant with big leaves would be great
A plastic bag
A bag tie
What To Do:
Step one: Wrap the plastic bag around a few leaves.
Step two: Tie off the bag so the plastic bag fully encloses the leaves.
Step three: Put the plant in a sunny spot.
Step four: Check back on the plant every half an hour or so.
What will Happen?
Over the course of a few hours, drops of water will form in the bag. The bag may even become foggy with the amount of condensation being developed by the plants.
Hi! I'm
Theresa Halvorsen, the preschool science and nature writer for Preschoolrock.com. I have twin boys and am blown away by their fascination with preschool science and how the world works around them. I am always looking for fun and simple science activities so preschoolers can learn about science and the natural world. Please
contact me with any suggestions, ideas or questions you have about this site.
"Unexpected" is the word to use rather than "wrong" — in science, results that don't match predictions are the most interesting. "The result was different from what we expected — that means we discovered something! Let's figure out why." This reframe makes the unexpected result a success rather than a failure, because it produced a question worth investigating. Science confidence is built by treating all results as valid data, never as failure.
Commercial science kits designed for ages 4+ can be engaging starting points. Look for kits that use simple, safe materials and produce visually dramatic results (crystal growing kits, volcano kits, solar system model kits). Avoid kits with very small parts, complex safety requirements, or expected outcomes that are frustrating when not achieved. The best kits are those that leave children wanting to experiment further beyond the kit's instructions — look for kits with extension activities built.
