Plants - teaching a topic - help!

[shopper-love]

I'm teaching a topic on plants looking at fruit this week to 5yo children. Would you say that there are flowering plants and plants i.e. trees that produce fruit. Would plants include vegetables too? Sorry if these seem stupid, hope you can help. Thanks

[southerngirl]

Anything that grows from the ground and has leaves or spines is a plant. There are various plants, cacti, herbs, trees, flowers, succulents, vegetables, ferns, grasses etc. The only exceptions are parasitic plants like mistletoe which live on other plants but don't grow out of the ground, and some types of lichen. However for the purposes of 5 year olds the above is a fair description.

You may want to distinguish mushrooms and toadstools as fungi, not plants.

Hope this helps

[vehelpfulguy]

Not wishing to confuse your kids, but did you know that tomato and cucumber are actually fruits ?

It is all to do with the definition of a fruit. A fruit has flesh protecting the seed, like an apple or an orange.

Tomato and cucumber also have flesh protecting the seed, so are fruits.

http://www.sciencebob.com/lab/q-tomato.html

[damo666]

so does that mean that pumpkin and marrow are fruits also?

[shopper-love]

Thanks that helps a lot guys

[shammydodger]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit