Sprouting Seeds and Knuckleheads

Last week, we talked about plant parts in science class. This kicked off a little experiment with seeds. We put bean seeds in 3 different locations in the room, and under 3 different conditions. One spot was right by the window. One spot was on the bookshelf across the room from the windows. The last spot was inside my supply closet with the door closed. In each location, we have a couple of seeds in a cup with soil, a couple of seeds in a plastic baggie with a wet paper towel, and a couple of seeds in a baggie with a pool of water.

Before we "planted" any of these seeds, the kids first talked about what conditions they thought the seeds would need to grow, and then they hypothesized which condition and location of our classroom seeds would grow best. Everyone hypothesized that the seeds in the cup by the window would grow best.

So imagine our great surprise yesterday, when we made our first official observations of the seeds, when we discovered that the seeds in the cup in the CLOSET were growing the best! I noticed that the cups on the bookshelf and by the window had tiny little stems starting to grow out of the soil, and that the roots were clearly visible along the inside of the clear plastic cups. But inside the closet, we seem to have Audrey II from The Little Shop of Horrors going wild!

Some of the kids thought that these seedlings, growing inches bigger than the ones that are out of the closet, were dead. Merely because they aren't green, and are in fact whiter than Justin Beiber. Yet they are getting bigger and bigger with each passing day!

The kids have been pretty good about respecting the delicateness of the seeds -- for the most part. I did have one knucklehead today, however, who broke that rule. Towards the end of the observation period, I kept hearing several kids saying, "C squished the frijole!" I immediately started breathing through my mouth, because I thought this might be some new euphemism for passing gas.

But no, C had actually taken one of the plastic baggies between thumb and forefinger and squeezed one of the seeds floating in the pool of water. It was just mush. When I demanded to know why he had done it, he finally said, "I thought it was hard."

I was a bit miffed, and I replied, "Well, I think your head is pretty hard, can I squish IT?"

C has received a restraining order from the seeds and must now remain at least 10 feet away at all times.

I don't need any more dead seeds to go along with my "dead" plants that are growing where the sun don't shine.

So where do they go after the dryer?

Today, I heard a very interesting declaration from one of my students. We watched a short online video called, "Sock Seeds." Two kids put socks over their shoes then went outside and walked around for awhile in an open field. When they took their socks off, they observed all of the seeds that their socks had picked up. The kids then "planted" the sock in a shoe box filled with potting soil, watered it, and declared that in a few short weeks, they would have a small garden sprouting from the sock seeds.

At the point in the video where the little girl started to bury the sock in the soil, one of my boys realized what was happening and enthusiastically told the child next to him, "That's where they get socks from!"

Off on another tangent, I called the house of one of my students who has not shown up all of this week. Her mother answered the phone, and when I asked about my student, the mother replied, "I thought she was on vacation?"

Um, no.

Ironically, this is one of my best behaved students. So I don't think that she lied to her mother maliciously. However, it does strike me as kind of odd that her mother would just take her word for it, without receiving any kind of notification from the school to verify. Not to mention the fact that she MUST have noticed the school buses continuing to pickup and drop off kids at the apartment complex.

Oh well, maybe she was too busy planting dollar bills.

A bad seed?

Yesterday, for my science test, I gave the kids a blank sheet of notebook paper and asked them to write down the answers for five review questions at the end of the chapter we had read this week. The chapter was mostly about seeds -- what they contain and how they are spread.

Most of my kids did not understand the whole concept of an open book test. I told them that they could use their book to find the answers by looking back in the chapter we read. While some began flipping back pages to look for the answers, I saw one little girl looking forward into the chapter about lizards and birds. I'm pretty sure that chapter doesn't contain any information about germination or seedlings.

Yet I still saw many of them just making completely random guesses at the answers without using the book. Often, what they wrote didn't even make any sense or did not answer the question. For example, question one was, "What is a seedling?" Roughly twelve kids wrote, "A seedling lives inside every seed." That's nice, but it doesn't tell me what a seedling IS. Just finding a sentence with the word in it does not always answer the question. If I ask someone, "Did the Cowboys win this weekend?" hopefully they will not respond, "The Dallas Cowboys are a professional football organization, located in Irving, Texas."

But my favorite part of grading the tests came with question 3. The question was, "What are some ways that seeds can be spread from one place to another?" Some of the answers to this one really showed that the kids were listening when we were talking about this part. A lot of them copied the caption from the book about cockleburrs latching onto a dogs fur. But one girl took the idea of an animal carrying seeds, and applied it to an animal that isn't listed anywhere in our science book.

"If a jaguar finds an apple and he does not know what it is and he carries it to somewhere else."

Helpful jaguar!!

Another girl wrote, "Some animals can help people carry things." I went ahead and gave her credit for this answer, assuming that by "things," she meant "seeds."

But the best answers came from the kids who remembers our discussion of how birds help spread seeds. There was a picture of a bird standing on a branch that ended in a group of berries. The caption explained that birds eat the berries, swallow the seeds, and the seeds passed through the digestive system unharmed. And thus the bird drops the seeds in a faraway location.

So I got a couple of priceless answers to question 3:

"A bird can eat the seed and can poopoo in another place."

and

"A bird eats the seed and they did their business and the seed falls."

These kids clearly understood the concept! Mr. Bloom, you might need to add another level to your Taxonomy, because these kids are marching up the ladder!