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.