Discussing Emotions with Cress Eggs

Making cress with egg shell's is some thing that reminds me of my childhood. It's a fantastic activity for a fast and simple growing activity with your children and also encourages them to try a different food. We recently tried some thing different with our cress heads by drawing each egg with a different expression. 

We started off by discussing how we would feel during different situations such as; if a friend broke our toy by accident, if we were lost, giving a friend a gift or if we won a prize. We wrote a list of these emotions and added others we thought of. We came up with:

Once the egg's all had faces we placed wet cotton wool in each of them and sprinkled on a the cress seeds. We added a bit too much but you only really need a pinch.  Over the next few days the children had great fun spraying the cotton wool with water and watching them grow. We measured the cress each day to see how big it had grown, the tallest measured 7cm. 

We plan to grow cress again this year to explore what are the best growing conditions for plants are and draw charts and sketches as they grow. There are many great ideas on how to use cress so I have shared a few below. 

Cress initials from Imagination Tree

Science with cress from Red Ted Art

Cress caterpillar from Rainy Day Mum