Botany Week 2

This week, I hurried into the classroom as soon as the previous class ended and made sure that no tables had more than 5 seats.  Last week they all huddled into two tables and they need more room for this class.  The objectives for this class were to be able to tell the difference between angiosperms and gymnosperms, dissect a bean, and prepare a sprouting cup to take home.

First, we reviewed the terms we learned last week - they are sharp cookies!  I thought the last group was pretty smart, but this class acts all this is "been there, done that."

Once you divide plants into vascular and non-vascular plants, you can further divide the vascular side into spore producing plants and seed producing plants.  There are two types of seed producing plants - angiosperms and gymnosperms.  To illustrate the difference, I brought out two toy vehicles:

Angiosperms have covered seeds - not unlike how your luggage would be in this stylish purple car.

Gymnosperms have exposed (uncovered) seeds - similar to your luggage tossed into the bed of this sweet ride.

To give them another memory peg, I told them that the gymno- in gymnosperm doesn't actually mean uncovered, it means naked.  Would you go the the GYM naked?  NO!  They laughed!

We passed out the magnifying glasses and each child was given a pine cone scale.  They picked the seeds off and looked at them.  That is really all we did with them because I thought I would be pressed for time, but I think we might have had time to sketch them.

Next I gave each child a few soaked pinto beans.  They removed the seed coat and pulled the bean into two pieces.  I did this with 1st graders back in B.C. (Before Caleb).

Cute baby!

The fish shaped piece is the baby plant.  The two (comparatively) big pieces - i.e. most of the bean - is the food the plant needs to sprout.  I brought a lunch box as a visual to help illustrate.  The "fish tail" is actually two leaves that are the first leaves of the plant.  They turn green as the plant grows and eventually fall off.

The kids drew the seed and labeled it for their notebooks:

Some sources called the baby leaves plumule and others epicotyl - the plumule ones labeled the part of the stem beneath the leaves the epicotyl.  We just labeled the leaves as epicotyl and didn't complicate things with the plumule.  But I don't think the scientific names are all the important for 3rd and 4th graders!

Finally, we built these:

Which was less complicated than I expected since most of the class had made them before.  This is one I made in advance.  I stressed the the plants can be moved to the ground after they sprout - a few of the students from my first botany class grew quite a crop of beans from this experiment!