These last couple of weeks have been a blur and as much as I love Spring Break, it is a pain preparing for the Master's coming to town. I love it, but our town and my house revolves around The Masters! It turns into a beautiful city during the spring and the azaleas are so beautiful everywhere!!!
Anyway, I only have 4 days before our Spring Break comes and it will be over just as soon as it began, but I will take it! With Springtime in full bloom, our Science unit goes hand in hand with what we are teaching... PLANTS and SEEDS! I know the curriculum is kind of boring when it comes to what we are supposed to teach, so of course I have to add to it by doing FUN stuff!
First we started with a K-W-L chart of what we know about plants. They seem to know a lot about plants so far, so teaching them will be easy... If I haven't mentioned, my class is super and smart! :)
After that we compared two Lima beans, one that was hard and the other one was soaked overnight. They all tried so hard to peel the seed coat off the one that wasn't soaked, and they couldn't believe the difference between the two. Not only were they easier to peel, but they doubled in size because they soaked up the water like a sponge! Then we took another soaked Lima bean and put it in a zip lock baggie with a wet paper towel. I then hung them in the window (luckily my window gets great sunlight all day long) and now the observing begins. They are going to keep a journal of what they see every day. I wish I had more than 5 days to do the plants, but hopefully it will start to grow some before Friday.
I also purchased a kit from Wal-Mart that had those disc that you soak in water and they expand to fill the pots... well my kids LOVED that and thought it was cool! I love the little things that seem to amaze them! These worked out great because we planted different seeds in each pot and watched them grow. I was surprised at how fast they did grow, but like I said, I wish I had another week so we could really watch them grow! The coolest thing happened, when I was cutting them apart, there were no stems growing, but underneath the roots were coming out of the bottom. What a cool learning time to see that just because the plant didn't grow on top, it was growing under the ground! So cool! The kit came with tomato seeds and a neat watering system you set on top. I labeled the sticks with their names on them and the kind of plant they planted.
Fast forward 2 weeks!!! I am now finally learning how update my blog from my phone and insert pictures!!! Yay me!! I think I might just get this whole blogging thing down after all!!
I also want to mention that we wrote in our daily journal and drew a picture of how our seed changed and on the last day, they wrote, "what do you think the seed will become?" As you can see in the pictures, they did grow quite a bit for just 5 days! They were so excited to see the different stages that the plants went through.
They did awesome with them!!! Check out the pictures!
Dry seed and the soaked seed.
Our Seeds
Our Window
We get full sunlight most of the day, so that helped a lot!
This is always one of my favorite Science activities to teach. I don't have any fun activities that I do other than the hands on stuff you see here and the journal, which was a simple word document. I hope they enjoyed as much I did!
