Sunday, April 6, 2014

Plant Lab Book

My students have been learning about plant life cycles. Last week we did a KWL (know, want to know, learned) chart on the board with post its. It went great! #1- They love using post it notes. #2- Any movement is good in my classroom, I have a few wiggle worms! However, I was surprised at some of the things they wanted to know. I was planning on planting seeds with them this week, anyways, but their curiosity spurred my plans in a different direction. Three of the things that intrigued me were: will plants grow if there is only a flashlight and no sun, will plants still grow if you give them root beer instead of water, and my favorite, will plants explode if they don't have sunlight? All great questions!!

So, rather than just growing plants next week, we will be experimenting, using those three questions as our variables. Some of the students will plant their seeds and stick it in a cabinet (testing the exploding theory-no sunlight), some will put it under our sink with a flashlight, some will plant them regularly, and others will give it root beer instead of water. So in order for us to track our findings, I created a cute little plant observation booklet. You can see thumbnails of what it looks like here. If you are a blog reader and want this file, I will email it to you for free until the end of April. Just shoot me an email (brandicriminger[at]yahoo[dot]com) and let me know you want it! After that, you can get it at my teachers pay teacher store for $1.99.