Some Growth

This is what our bean/seed looks like today--you can see its little tap root reaching towards the water and the beginnings of a sprout emerging from the seed. So awesome! It's been fun to check it out every day, or a few times a day and note the differences we see, which are sometimes drastic.

Today we moved onto some more in-depth knowledge about seeds and plant growth.

I found a lesson plan online that I used to supplement what I wanted to teach the kids--it can be found here: bean plant lesson plan.

First, I must tell you that I quite accidentally broke one of the seeds/beans we had been trying to grow. It was falling down into the water and I was trying to pull it back up to the middle of the plastic baggie, when the bean just fell apart. Nevertheless, I was able to use this minor set-back as a positive experience. Since that bean was mid-growth, it served as a great opportunity for us to take out the seed and observe what was going on with it. I showed the boys how beans have two sides, and a skin-like structure surrounding the two sides. They were able to feel these things with their hands and see them up close. There was also a teensy, tiny little root that had begun to grow and so we got to hold that and inspect it as well.

When I was pretty satisfied the boys understood the parts of a seed, we went on to discuss the lifecycle of the bean plant. I had printed out the lesson plan I mentioned before, which includes a cut-and-paste style worksheet that illustrates the phases of life for a bean plant. I precut out a set for each boy and I allowed them to color the pictures while I explained each one. Then I drew a big circle on the middle of a piece of construction paper and asked the boys to glue the pictures onto the circle in the order they go in. As they guessed at, and tried to remember, which picture went where, I helped them along and reinforced the knowledge for them. I then had them draw arrows to indicate the the progression of the lifecycle of the bean plant.

I think my boys would tell you this was a more tedious activity and not as enjoyable as some of the others, but hey, they can't all be fun and games, right? I was very happy when, at the end of our time together, the boys could tell me about how a bean plant grows from seed to plant, and then from plant to seed. They could identify how this created a "cycle" which was a word they didn't previously fully understand. They knew vocabulary terms like "seed, root, shoot, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit" and could correctly apply them to the pictures we discussed.  More excitingly, they could then take a look at our own, real life, bean plant in the window and accurately determine which phase our plant was in.  That was pretty cool.

Sometimes I'm such a nerd. Like...all the time. I just love it when these kids know stuff!