This week, we began our unit on plants and started off with some real world observations in the back yard. Any chance the students have to explore their natural environment and be scientists brings the topics to life, so I really try to incorporate this as much as possible and as we are moving into the world of things that are big enough for us to see, this will be easier and easier. They each picked three plants to study and compare. I was a little worried that January might be a difficult month to observe plants, but luckily, living in CA, winter is pretty gentle and our backyard is full of green right now. Based on their observations, we were able to have a discussion about the traits of plants and then went through our checklist from our unit on characteristics of life and made a list of how plants fit those requirements. We then watched a couple short videos and filled out a not taking guide about the plant kingdom classification. We will be coming back to a lot of these terms and concepts in the next three weeks, but I wanted to introduce them to the vocabulary so we could start getting comfortable with the terms. We ended how we began, outside, looking at the plants and opening up bean seeds to see the plant embryo inside. Ask your child if they remember a couple basic ways to tell a monocot from a dicot plant.
Follow up ideas: Videos: Classifying Plants This video is longer than the ones we watched in class, and covers everything very clearly if you would like to review what we discussed. Bean Time Lapse It's really fun to watch plants grow! Young Sunflowers Follow the Sun We talked about how some plants react to the sun and move with its light. We had mistakenly said that the sunflower's flower will do this, which a couple of the students were skeptical because the flower isn't the part that photosynthesizes. This video shows that it is actually the young plant with only a flower bud that moves with the sun. Activities: Go out in your yard, visit a park, or go for a hike and see if you can identify flowering (angiosperms) and non-flowering (gymnosperms) plants. When you find flowering plants, see if they are monocots or dicots (we will learn more about this next week, but this week, we learned that monocots usually have flower petals in multiples of 3, dicots are multiples of 4 or 5; monocot leaves have long, parallel veins, dicot leaves have branching veins--think maple tree leaves). Find seeds, either from plants outside, or look through your kitchen, and try opening them up and looking for the plant embryo. Large beans, like pinto (which is what we used in class) or kidney or great northern beans work great. Look at corn to see a monocot seed. This video goes over how you can examine the seeds, although you can also keep it pretty simple and just rub the soaked seed gently in your fingers to remove the coat and then separate the parts.
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May 2020
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