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Nature Science: Growing Mushrooms With Kids

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Mushrooms.

I find them highly delicious, but I am the only one in my family who feels that way!  (I have one daughter almost convinced.)  Whether you think they taste good or not, they are quite fun to grow.  I have been wanting to try growing mushrooms for a while now and thought my kids would find it fascinating, too.  It is a really cool nature science idea to do indoors with kids during the winter.

Growing Mushrooms with kids

Growing mushrooms is really not that hard. I don’t do very well with indoor plants, but this one, I could handle!

There are a few different ways to grow your own mushrooms.

You can buy your own mushroom growing kits that have the mushroom spawn (don’t you just love that term?!) 🙂  in them already. It comes in a little log form wrapped in plastic. This is what we used for our experiment.

 

Mushroom spawn is simply anything that has mycelium added into it. Mycelium is a collection of the mushroom fungus cells.

To grow them from the kit, you just open them up and mist them twice each day for about three weeks.   You keep it in a well-lit place, but not direct sunlight.

Enclosed in the kit is a spray bottle for misting the log and a plastic bag to cover it and keep it moist all the time. It was so easy and fun to watch the development of it! Once the mushrooms started growing, they grew so quickly and my kids and I were excited to watch the new developments each day.

growing mushrooms at home

Then, you can re-use the log up to 3 times!  My first batch looked a little crazy, because I did not pull the last down on the sides

mushroom growing kit

 

The cool part is that these mushrooms are edible and quite delicious!

Another direction you can take  to grow your own mushrooms is to buy a set of 100 mushroom spawn plugs. You insert them into a log, cardboard or straw and treat them the same way to grow them yourself.

 

This is an amazing nature science lesson for kids. Since mushrooms are not typical plants, it is a really cool way to teach them about fungus and how they grow. It’s also a great time to let kids know that all mushrooms are not the same!  I had a child eat a mushroom from out in our yard one time and panicked!  I called poison control and learned that the ones with the black bottom are the ones to be most worried about being poisonous. But, when in doubt, never eat one from outdoors!

This s part of the 28 Days of STEAM series from Left Brain Craft Brain. This week’s theme is nature. Go check out the amazing series. There are some awesome ideas.

 

28 Days of STEAM

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3 Comments

  1. Good Activity! I enjoyed how thorough your explanation was and I sure kids will love it.

    One thing: you mentioned that mushrooms are not typical plants. Very true. They are not plants at all. They can’t make their own food like plants can. They belong in the Fungus Kingdom.

    I don’t want to sound fussy but I taught Science for decades and I just want the kids to have the correct information. There is enough fake news out there now so I like to Science to stay clear of that. Keep up the good work.

    Thanks!

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