Happy New Plants!

Our Wandering Jew plants have gotten bigger. We have put them in pots of their own. Their heights are bigger than 3 weeks ago when we left for vacation. Many of them grew new leaves. Some of our friends' plants are 1 foot tall!

We also planted some pumpkin sprouts! Before the break Mrs. M. took some seeds from a left over pumpkin and put them in large baggy terrariums. Then they were put in the window for sunlight. 2 of the bags had sprouts in them today! The other two just had dirt and mold. We potted the sprouts in 5 pots and we hope they will grow into pumpkins! We'll see!

Wandering Jews in Baggie Terrariums

For the past couple of weeks, we've been learning as much as we can about the house plant called the Wandering Jew. We got cuttings of the plant on our trip to the green houses at C. O. D. We put them in plastic baggy terrariums. Today we opened some of them up because they were too wet or growing too tall. Here's what we've found out about Wandering Jew plants. They are tropical tender perennials which means they like warm climates and grow over a period of several years. It grows between 36 and 48 inches tall. It doesn't have seeds. It is a popular house plant. It can be found outdoors in eastern Mexico and South America. They need 24 to 36 inches between them to grow the best. It is related to the spider plant. The leaves can be 2 inches long. Make sure you don't over water them. It is also known as an inch plant. It prefers a combination of sunlight and shade. It likes humid environments. It will turn white when it's all done growing.

C.O.D. Green House Field Trip pictures

We had a GREAT time at COD Green House today!

Pulling up Evil Thistle (and other bad weeds)

Today was a nice day. So, we went outside and went on a thistle hunt! We saw a lot of evil thistle and twisty vine-like weedy things. We know that weeds are bad because they take in minerals from the dirt. Plants that are planted near them do not get all the nutrients and can die! Some weeds can choke the plants by wrapping itself around the stems of a plant. The weed's leaves cover the plant's leaves and block out the sunlight and the plant can die. That's what the twisty vine-like weedy things were doing. Some weeds grew and spread out in a circle on the ground. Then they put down more roots and kept on growing. This blocks the sunlight from the ground and can stop plants from growing up. One of us found a thistle root with 2 thistles growing out of it! Amazing and terrible at the same time. 2 thistles for one root! AAARRRGGGHHH! The good news is that the cold weather is starting to kill the thistles, too! Some of the thistles we saw (and pulled out) were turning yellow.
Next week we're going on a field trip to tour a greenhouse!

How to Make our Gardens Better

Today we had a visitor from C.O.D. Miss Britt is the manager at the greenhouses there. She brought a HUGE verigated spider plant with her. Verigated means it is different from the original plant. Most plants, when they first start out, are all green. When they get sick, they can get streaks of white in them. When this happens, growers may try to make more of them because the leaf is pretty. We learned that plants like this or with lighter colored leaves need more sunlight, or they'll turn back to mostly green!
Then we went outside to look at our gardens with her. She showed us a poke weed that was covered in baby aphids. Aphids are mean little bugs that eat plants and kill them. We also learned that bees eat aphids! We didn't know that! We learned that bugs like aphids can survive through the winter, sort of like hibernating. When they wake up in the spring they can start eating all our good plants! This is not good news. So we're going to pull that weed and throw it and all the baby aphids away.
Miss Britt also told us how to move the tall grasses in front of the 3rd grade classroom windows. We'll have to wait until March or April, before they start to regrow for the spring. Then we'll have to dig them up and plant them somewhere else. Then she gave us some suggestions for what to plant in our outdoor classroom that will survive the shade, be pretty and cover up the beds. Finally we looked at our hosta garden. She had some good ideas on how to prevent thistles from growing there in the spring. Hopefully we'll get to try them out.
We're going to go tour C.O.D. green houses in 2 weeks! We are really looking forward to that!

Thinking for Spring

Today we planted flower bulbs in the reading garden. They'll be blooming blue and yellow in the spring! Here's the plan we came up with! S is for scillia, H is for hyacinths, C is for crocus, MD is for mini daffodils. All our blooms should be in blue and yellow. The crocus might be purple and white, so we'll have to wait and see.


We also found lots and lots of grubs in the soil! Yuck! They are short fat little worms with legs and they eat roots. Our bulbs are roots! So we picked as many of them out as we could and threw them in the garbage! We feel very accomplished and can hardly wait to see the sprouts in the spring!

New Homes for Our Plants

Yuck! Slugs are sooooo gross, but soooo cool! They are bad for plants because they nibble on roots and leaves. This makes it hard for the plant to grow. We found a slug today when we were re-potting and splitting one of our tropical plants. We got rid of him.
It is important to re-pot plants because some plants use all the nutrients in the soil and need more soil. Re-potting them is healthy for them. Sometimes the roots take over the pot and take the shape of the pot. This is called being root bound. If we don't re-pot, the plant won't grow any larger.
We re-potted our two avocado trees today. We call them Big Brother (he's been alive for 2 years) and Little Sister (she was planted last summer). We hope that they'll be big and strong and grow avocados. We really like guacamole!
We also learned the term "back-filling" today. This means we put soil back over the roots and tamp it down to protect the plant's roots. It was awesome today! :)

We're Back!

We have finally started school again! We have new 2nd graders. Our old second graders are now 3rd graders. We are back at taking care of our gardens at school. Last week we picked evil spiky thistles. We are pulling them to make our gardens look better. The first place we pulled up thistles was in the reading garden out front. We also pulled out weeds in the gardens outside the 3rd grade classrooms. Today, we worked in our hosta garden. It had a bunch of weeds, like dandelions and baby trees. We picked and picked and picked all the grass that had grown in there, too! Some of us got to use snippers. They got to cut off all the dead flower stems off the hostas. The weird plant that we noticed last year has continued to grow. We decided to let it stay.

Happy National Arbor Day

We planted a tree today! We had to dig a hole first. It looked like Mrs. M. was on a pogo stick when she jumped on the shovel. We laughed! The tree we planted is a red oak. It's very small and skinny and when we went back to put more soil around the base, we almost couldn't see it! It blends in with the grassy field we put it in. It's supposed to be fast growing, but we don't know how fast. Hopefully by next year we won't have to worry about it being mowed when they cut the grass. Mrs. M. is going to put a fence around it so that it doesn't get mowed this year. We will have to make sure it gets water for awhile so that the roots will start growing into the soil around it.
Today at Park View is Gardening Day. So we also planted pansies and chrysanthemums in the barrel garden out front and in the reading garden. We had to dig holes there, too. We found that there were killer grubs in the soil. We threw them onto the sidewalk and squished 'em. There were also earthworms. We know that all the soil everywhere has gone through the body of an earthworm in the past two years. We made sure to put the earthworms safely back into the ground. It rained last night, so the soil was nice and soft and wet.
Park View is looking good!

Come On Spring!

We're so excited about all the new growth that showing up everywhere!

In our classroom, we have been fascinated with our space and earth seeds. We have over 20 sprouts in each planter. The leaves of the ones that are the oldest are starting to stretch out into oval, rather than being circles. They have noticed that newer plants have tiny stems and 2 thin leaves. The stems sometimes look purple or red. When they get older 2 more leaves form between the other two and then even more leaves grow from there, too.














Something interesting has happened in our earth plants. Not only do we have a stranger (that we think is grass) mushrooms grew there this week! We know that they are decomposers, but we aren't sure what it's decomposing.














The rest of our time we spent researching the different plants we have in our classroom. We are going to make little pod casts about them. We were very productive today!

Spring weather!

Today we checked on our seed experiment. We have 25 sprouts from the earth seeds and 20 sprouts from the space seeds. Each planter has a stranger. The earth planter has a plant that looks like grass. The space planter has a plant that has bigger and fatter leaves. It also looks fuzzy on the stem. These strangers probably just came from the soil.
We also looked at onion skin slides. We looked at them under the microscopes. The onion cells looked like rectangles, really long rectangles. Their corners were kind of rounded. But they were all stacked together like legos. We dyed one sample with iodine to turn the cells yellow. We hoped that the nuclei would should up better, and they did. :) It was cool.

Go to your CELL!

Today we looked at plants to see if we could find cells. There are three certain parts that every cell must have. One is the cell membrane. It protects the inside of the cell like skin. Another part is the nucleus. The nucleus is the brain of the cell. Cytoplasm is the third part. It's the liquid filling. For plants, the cells must also have a cell wall. Cell walls protect the plant from outside things. It's stronger than the cell membrane, it's thicker, too.
We made slides and looked for the different parts of a plant cell. We found them! When we first looked, we saw lots of cells piled together. Then when we looked closer we could make out the cell membranes and some of us could see the nucleus in a few. There were lots of cells.
It was really awesome and a little disgusting, too.
This cell picture came from: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/plants/cell/

Up close and personal!

Today we made slides of plants and looked at them through the microscopes. They were purple and green and they were very cool to look at. We took samples from plants in our room. We chose Mother-In-Law Tongue, Coleus, and Chrysanthemum. We also looked at prepared slides of algae, onion, and pine tree. They all had veins. We also noticed a pattern. Many of them had stripes, or circles or geometric shapes. We were surprised to see that. Some of us thought we'd just see one large piece. Instead we were impressed to see lots of little circles and squares joined together. They are cells. There were dots inside a lot of the circles and squares, too. One more thing we did was look through a strong magnifier at a pea pod. It looked hairy. It was very 3-D-ish. Very awesome.
Our space seeds and earth seeds experiment is going well. We have sprouts. Some of the sprout stems are spreading out in a V toward the leaves and some are just straight. The ones that are more grown have more circular leaves. The ones that have just gotten started have more pointy leaves. The dirt in the space container seems to be grayer - weird.

Seeds from Space

We're very excited about a new experiment we're doing. Mrs. M. contacted NASA and they sent her some seeds that have been in space! So we are learning the scientific method while we see if going to space makes a difference for Cinnamon Basil seeds.
In 2007 about 10 million seeds were taken up in the space shuttle Endeavor. When they came back, NASA packaged them up and said classrooms could have them for experiments. We got 2 packets. When they sent the space seeds they also sent some earth seeds. They are the same kind of seeds, Cinnamon Basil, but they stayed on the Earth. We figured out that we got earth seeds so we could compare them to the space seeds to see if there is any difference. Mrs. M. told us that this is called a "control" since we know they should grow like they normally do.

So the first step of the scientific method is stating the question. Our question is "Does being in space change how cinnamon basil seeds grow?" The second step in the scientific method is forming a hypothesis. We learned that hypothesis means a very smart guess. We like this because it's supposed to be a guess and if we get it wrong, it's not a big deal because it was a guess to begin with. The purpose is to make us think and have an idea about what experiment to do to find out the answer to our question. We all made our own hypotheses. Some of us think there won't be any difference. Some of us do, like maybe the plants from the space seeds will grow taller or shorter or have different sized leaves.

The third step in the scientific method is perform the experiment. We wrote out what we planned to do. We planted the earth seeds in one planter and the space seeds in another planter and placed them both by the window for sunlight. We plan to take moisture readings every day we're in school and water if the soil measures a 1 or 2. On Fridays we will record our observations in our plant journals. We'll do this until Spring Break, so about 2 months.

When we planted the seeds we noticed right away that the seeds that had been in space were all dark while the ones that had stayed on earth had some dark and some light. Also the space seeds seemed to feel thicker than the ones that stayed on earth. We planted both in there own planters and made little signs for each so we'd not forget which was which. We can hardly wait to see what happens!

Finally!

With our snow day, our cold day, a testing day, and vacation, it's been 6 weeks! Fortunately Mrs. M. was able to give our little jar plants a drink every once in awhile. Today we were able to check on them again. Many of us still have plants, but some are looking a little pale. Some of us actually had lots and lots of new little plants because he planted a whole bunch of new seeds the last time we met. Anyway, we did our measurements and observations and recorded them in our journals. It was fun to flip through all the pages and see the changes. We are taking our plants home today though. Hopefully they'll survive a little cold on the way. Today is a little warmer so they should be okay. We should put them in a warm space near a window when we get home to help them perk back up. Next week we are going to plant some "space seeds"! Mrs. M. got them from Nasa. They were taken up into space on a space shuttle mission. We're going to do an experiment with them and see if they do anything differently than seeds that haven't been in space. Cool, huh?

Plant Detectives

Because the weather has been so cold . . . brrrrrr . . . we've been doing some learning on the computers about plants. We used a really cool site: http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/gpe/index.html
to learn about the different parts of plants and what they need to grow. After we finished researching a "case file" we solved some plant mysteries. It was fun. We worked in partners, too, which made it a little easier.
We also did some more plant observations. The seeds that we planted at the beginning of the year keep showing us new stuff. Sometimes they grow really well. Sometimes they shrivel and die. Sometimes nothing happens. Today, 3 more of us reseeded our plant jars. We put in LOTS of seeds to make sure SOMETHING grew. Next week we will take our plants home. Since we'll be gone for 2 weeks, it would be a good idea to have them in a warm home instead of a chilly school. Hopefully it won't be too cold on the way home. These flower sprouts don't like chilly weather.

SHOOTS!

Were we surprised when we saw how many different plants were shooting up in our flower jars! Those of us who re-seeded have lots and lots of little sprouts. We think they will need some more room soon. So we'll be transplanting them into larger containers. We continue to journal our observations. Some of us are measuring how long the leaves are growing. We all measure how much water our soil is holding. Someone also noticed today that all the plants seem to be leaning in one direction. We realized this was because we had left our jars sitting next to the window for 2 weeks. All the plants were growing toward the light! Fascinating!
For the rest of our time today, we worked in cross grade partners to study plants on the internet. Once we have reviewed our first case, we will attempt to solve a mystery.

The Cut and Mulch Salon

Okay, it was pretty darn cold today, but the sun was out so Mrs. M. said we had to get out and do some winterizing. The first thing we did was cut back the tall grasses outside the 3rd grade windows. We would grab a handful with two hands and Mrs. M would use loppers to cut the stalks off close to the ground. Then we had to fold the long grass a couple of time to put it in a large bag. We filled up 4 bags with the grasses. There is still one more grass plant that needs to be trimmed, but we had to get to the front reading garden before our class time was over.


In the front reading garden we cut back all the mums and mulched them. If we cover up the stems, they should stay nice and toasty during the winter and be ready to bloom again next fall. We all took turns using the smaller clippers to cut the mums back. We had shoveled a trashcan full of mulch and used it all up to cover the trimmed mums.
We had a few minutes to go check on our jar flowers. We were so excited. Many of us who replanted last week have up to 6 plant stems! It's wonderful to see something growing after such a long time of nothing. One of us realized we had drowned the seeds, because when we tipped the glass jar, water seeped out of the dirt. She'll probably have to replant next time, with a few others who still don't have anything growing.

Rainy Day :(

Today we wanted to go outside and winterize our gardens. But Mother Nature thought it would be funny to play a joke on us. It rained. :( So, instead we worked in our plant journals. We took a look at our jar flowers. Those of us who didn't have any plants got to plant new seeds. We had to loosen the soil and take some out. Turns out we had those pretty packed. We found some seeds had tried to grow and there were baby roots, but they were too deep in the soil. Next we took dead plants out of their pots to study the roots. We were surprised how long some of the roots were. Once we took off all the soil, we found 2 worm friends and a roly poly bug. We invited them to live in some of our living plants. Last we used all of our soil, mixed it with a bulb fertilizer, and put it in an aquarium. We planted about 10 bulbs, most of which were tulips. We think the other were daffodils. We will see. Hopefully something will grow.

Mini Paws

Did we mention that we also had 11 mini paws? These are for all our school staff who are not classroom teachers. So last Friday, we wrote all the instructional assistants', specialists' and staff's names on the little paws. We put them in a wagon and went around the school looking for everyone. When we found someone who wasn't busy, we told them what we were doing, found their paw, inked up their thumb, and cleaned them up after they printed. We called ourselves "full-service" because we brought the paint, paper towels, wet wipes and the garbage! We all had a job and it was fun. We didn't find everyone, though, so Mrs. M had to send a e-mail to invite all the rest. They've been coming in all week. The mini paws look great, too!