Potato Heads!

This project is one of my favorites in all my years of preschool.

It’s creative and fun, but you have to be patient. Remember the boy in the The Carrot Seed book? But we are planting wheat berries inside a potato head! Here’s how. First find your potato. There might be one for your brother or sister in there too. Thanks for sharing.

Next find the baggie with the wheat berries, half a paper cup and a small piece of cotton. Hold your potato and decide which end you want to be the top and which for the bottom.

Stand it up in the cup (take the cotton out of the cup for now. Likely your potato will tilt a little and we need it to stand straight up so its wheat berry hair will not fall out when you water it. So your grown ups will cut a small piece off the bottom so it will be flat on the bottom to stand up straight.

Then your grown ups will cut a slightly bigger piece off the top to make room to scoop a space for the wheat berries. Save this top and bottom to plant outside, like you did with Caroline at preschool and you might get a potato plant and some new potatoes!

 

Next, your grown ups will use a small spoon to scoop out some potato from the top of your Potato Head. Your grown up will want to leave the edges intact and unbroken if possible so that the wheat berries will stay in there and the water won’t drip out too much. It should be about 3/4 of an inch deep so there is room for the moistened cotton ball plus the wheat berries which will almost double in size when they are wet and start to sprout.

 

 

 

 

Next kids, with grown up supervision (with a permanent marker) can draw a face on the front of your potato head . It’s a good idea to do this with the head in the cup so none of the drawing will get covered up by the cup.

After you draw the face, kids can get the cotton ball wet with water, put it in the scooped out spot and add a spoonful of wheat berries, then another spoonful of water. Pat the wheatberries down to get them nice and moist.

And now we wait to see what happens. Will your Potato Head’s hair grow? How long will it take? How tall will it grow? Put it in a place where it can get some sunlight but not too hot. Give it a spoonful of water every day, carefully so the wheat berries won’t fall out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use you little white notebook with the red spiral to write down the date you planted it. Take a photo every few days and write down more observations in your notebook. Later you can use a ruler to measure in inches and centimeters how tall your Potato Head’s hair grows!  Keep the cotton ball and the wheat berries moist. If the hair grows really tall (with grown up help), you can give it a hair cut!! Take some photos of your Potato Head in progress to send to Lynn.

 

And if you eventually get (too many?) fruit flies? Well, that might be time to compost your potato or plant it in your garden to see if more potatoes will grow.