Growing Green Thumbs

We've moved from earth science, to life science, and things are growing in the fourth grade room. Students learned the proper way to plant a seed, water it, and now they are seeing the results. We have seedlings growing in our room! We are very excited each day to see how much our seedlings have grown, and changed.

Also, we are learning the parts of a seed, and to see how they grow into a plant. We germinated bean seeds. Roots are sprouting, and seedlings are pushing their way out of the seed coat. We are noticing all the changes to our bean seeds as we check them each morning.

We are noticing that some seeds are not sprouting, and that leads us to our next objective--the concept of biotic potential (maximum number of offspring a single plant or animal can produce in a lifetime). Students will grow a sample of seeds in order to compare the biotic potential to the actual number of seeds that sprout. We will do this with corn seeds.

Then we move on to the parts of a flower, and learning the life cycle of a plant.

Seems to me we could make a nice meal out of our beans, peas, and corn when they mature!