Botany Week 9

This week we moved down to the roots.  I know I said last time that I would focus on one main thing, but roots had 3 main things and I am just going to let the kids pick which part to remember.

The first fact about roots that we discussed is that they help prevent erosion.  I did this last time - you take two plastic bottles and cut one side out of them, fill one with dirt and put a strip of sod or plant plants in the other one.  (I used sod.)  When you set them up tilted and pour water on top, they will drain out the hole into a cup.  The water from the sod bottle is almost clear, while the dirt bottle looks like gritty coffee.  Point taken.

The second fact is that roots absorb water and, more specifically, the root hairs do most of the water absorbing.  I spouted some radish seeds on Tuesday and by today they had grown about 1-2 cm long roots with feathery root hairs all over.  The kids looked at them with magnifying glasses and then I told them they could keep the sprouts and plant them at home.

The third fact was that there are two main types of roots - fibrous roots and tap roots.  We made a page for our lab books by making roots out of yarn.  These came out really cool and everyone did a good job, which is really amazing because when I did a trial of this page, I shook my head and said, no way will this work!  Mine looked cool, and I really wanted to do it, but I had low expectations.  I looked over my lesson plan, cut out another thing I did last time and decided to go for it.  Definitely the right choice.

This week has had A LOT of other distractions and this class was struggling to make one of my top priorities.  Actually most of the semester has felt like this!  But this week was especially so.  To have all the academic things work well this week feels like a bit of grace.

I still have not gotten a handle on the wiggly, chatty kids.  Naturally, this is the sort of thing that gets worse if you don't get a good grip on it right away.  Part of me is just enduring it until it is over.  During class, I will go through waves of having everyone's attention and then losing them all over again.  Today I think they were especially hyper and even though I had an awesome volunteer, it was a struggle.  I wish I knew better how to manage them, not only for my own benefit, but because it is just not fair to the kids who sit quietly and work hard.