This is our second Herb Fairy Nature Adventure!!! In 2021-2022 we will be going through all 13 books of the Herb Fairy series and celebrating each month with our friends! Class is limited to 50 kids so if you plan to attend please make sure to sign up here!
https://kindandcultivated.home.blog/grid-blog/monthly-nature-events/
You can order the Herb Fairy series from Learning Herbs or get each book individually on Amazon!
Book 2 in the Herb Fairies is about violets – their special reproductive qualities, taste, and healing properties! My children love learning with these books and have really come to have an appreciation and excitement for foraging each month! (You can read about chickweed here!)
The extra special effect of our violet Nature Adventure was watching the color change magic trick!
I had so much fun preparing this violet lemonade for our class and see the excitement on the kids faces when they saw the magic happen! If you would like to make this lemonade at home, here is an easy recipe and a great explanation why the violets change color when lemon is added!
Before we had our special treat, it was nature journaling time. One habit that I want my children and our classes to continue to grow is the discipline of observing and adding to a nature journal. My friend Lara’s kids are doing an incredible job with their journals! When we observed the petal arrangement of the violets we learned about the term “zygomorphic.” Who knew there was a science around the study of flower symmetry?! I love learning more as I prepare for these nature classes! To explain the idea behind “bilateral symmetry” or zygomorphic flowers, I talked about how if we put a mirror image up to our face horizontally so the top of our nose and our eyes reflected the top half of our face and projected to the bottom half of our face, we would have a monster looking face with 4 eyes! But, if we put a mirror up to our face vertically down the middle we would have a much more normal looking reflection. You can see Jackson’s understanding of this symmetry in the picture below! Violets can only be symmetrical in one way. With a vertical line going right down the middle.
It was a joy to see all the children have fun in nature while learning more about herbs! I look forward to foraging for more violets this spring and trying my hand at making candied violets and violet jelly!
If you’re unable to source and forage for your own violets, you can always order dried herbs online! This is the product I ordered to make our lemonade!
To learn more about violets I enjoyed these videos!
KIND + CULTIVATED 
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