Pajama Day Pillow Fights

Experimenting with Plants

We started our plant unit with an activity to show what a plant needs to grow. The children pretended to be seeds, rooting their feet on the floor so they couldn't move. Then I sprinkled small colored pieces of paper on top of them.The children did not know what the colors represented- blue was for water, brown was for soil, and yellow was for sun. I also included a few red papers for diseases and black for bugs.  The children picked up as many papers as they could without moving their feet. Then we looked at what each child had to see if they would survive. If they had no blue ones, they wouldn't survive. If they had more yellow than the others, they may live in a desert. If they had too many blue, they might drown. The red or black automatically died. It was a good way to show how hard it is for a seed to survive. 

It was also fun to see celery leaves turn blue after the celery stem was put in blue water. It is a great way to show how plants absorb water and nutrients.

We have had fun learning about plants and what they need to grow. We did an experiment planting seeds in water/ no water, dirt/ no dirt, and light/ no light. The children predicted which ones would grow and were amazed that all the seeds grew except the one with no water. The seed with no light grew the fastest and the leaves were yellow and scrawny instead of green. The seed in water with no dirt also grew roots but stopped growing when the sprouts started.