The creation of schoolyard gardens is a growing movement in the United States and around the world (Ballard, Tong, and Usher 1998; Pope 1998; Lewis 2004). It brings together all of the features of authentic hands-on science: Students can collect data on plant growth, observe the plant and animal interactions in the garden, and acquire a sense of nature and environmental issues. Here the author shares how easy it can be to start a schoolyard garden, using an in-class germination project as a starting point. With just a tiny plot of land, they created a mini-garden that infused third-grade students with a sense of pride and accomplishment.
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Plants are a ubiquitous piece of the elementary science curriculum. By the time they reach middle school, students have often grown enough bean seeds to feed a small city. Often these lessons don’t “grow” deeper ideas from the basic observations of plant germination. To cultivate your students' understanding of plants, this month's column sheds light on a selection of engaging activities in this issue, which is devoted to the theme, "Plants and their Partners."
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This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer.
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Developing expertise, whether from cook to chef or from student to scientist, occurs over time and requires encouragement, guidance, and support. One key goal of an elementary science program should be to move students toward expertise in their ability to design investigative questions. The ability to design a testable question is difficult for novice science students and requires teachers to support students by using concrete strategies. This article promotes a tangible strategy teachers can use to help students design testable questions for experiments and discusses how the strategy can be used to help students design their own investigative questions.
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Honeybees, butterflies, and ladybugs all have fascinating mutually beneficial relationships with plants and play important ecosystem roles. Children also love these creatures. But how do we teach children about these symbiotic interactions and help them appreciate their vital roles in our environment? One must is to give children direct experience observing and exploring living things in the world around them. Direct experiences excite children about science, but Louv notes that “most children today are hard-pressed to develop a sense of wonder” (2005, p. 95). With that in mind, this series of experiences with living things was designed to encourage this kind of wonder in students.
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One of the most captivating things about plants is the way they capture the Sun’s energy, but this can be a difficult topic to cover with elementary students. Therefore, to help students to make a concrete connection to this abstract concept, this series of solar-energy lessons focuses on leaves and how they act as “solar collectors.” As students pondered the mechanics of leaves’ solar-collecting abilities, they began to understand plant behavior in a meaningful way.
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In order to move students’ thinking from the exploration experiences to concept understanding (and thus the ability to then apply that understanding), teachers must deliberately consider students’ misconceptions, the intermediate steps to the accurate conception, and how to scaffold students’ understanding step-by-step to the desired understanding. A particular challenge is that students often use the exploration experiences to support their misconceptions. This does not mean that experience is unimportant—but it does mean that our role in the concept development phase is crucial. This month’s column discusses how to effectively move students from experience to understanding.
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Self-regulated learners are able to set learning goals, find strategies that help them achieve those goals, and monitor their progress (Schraw, Crippen, and Hartley 2006). An important part of self-regulation is thinking about thinking, or metacognition. According to cognitive scientists (Donovan and Bransford 2005), metacognition involves self-monitoring and reflection on learning. Researchers have shown that metacognition can support student learning with understanding in many subjects. This month’s column describes how metacognition can support science learning and includes strategies that can be used to promote this critical skill.
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When it comes to directly interacting with and doing experiments with organisms, plants have some distinct advantages over animals. Their diversity and accessibility allows students to use them in experiments, thus practicing important science inquiry skills. This article describes an investigation that was designed to help students appreciate the relationships between the form and function of plant structures as they experimentally test plant adaptation. In this simple classroom experiment, fifth- and sixth-grade students examined and compared different types of seeds and investigated which seeds travel farthest on the wind.
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Oh yes. Sometimes their conversation is flowery, sometimes not. Plants with problems try to converse and get to the root of the problem, but if not, they have been known to stalk one another. This often creates a situation where one plant leaves town, reputation soiled. But seriously, folks … Plants do communicate with other plants and organisms as well as with insects, although it’s unlikely they use lame puns about plant parts. In this column, the author discusses this communication with separate categories: communication within a plant, communication between plants, communication between plants and insects, and communication between plants and insects together.
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What do you get when you add 20 kindergarten students and a student-led science discussion for the first time? Mass chaos! So, after taking some time to recover, the authors began to reflect on what they could change to help orchestrate quality science discussions in their kindergarten class. They wondered how they could empower young learners to partake in science discussions that would include participating, negotiating, taking turns, and listening to others. From these reflections, a “Science Conversation” plan was formed and implemented. They found that student-led discussions can begin in kindergarten. These young students are very capable… and they have a lot to say!
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Students often seek affirmation from their teachers about their thinking and can be embarrassed at the thought of being “wrong.” In science, we want children to feel comfortable making hypotheses and to know that it’s the investigative process—not being right or wrong—that really counts. In the following activity, students will participate in an experiment where they are likely to formulate a hypothesis that will ultimately be unsupported. Because most of the class will have made similar hypotheses, students won’t feel singled out in being “wrong.” Furthermore, students will see that surprise findings can be more interesting than outcomes that were suspected all along.
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From a tiny radish seed to a giant coconut, seeds come in a multitude of shapes and sizes. They all share one amazing secret: the potential to grow into a new plant when conditions are right. In this month’s column, students observe a variety of seeds, match seeds to the plants they grow into, explore what seeds need to germinate and grow, and design investigations with seeds.
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Growing peas helps children who grow food at home make a connection between school and home by sharing their experience, and those who have never seen a field of crops make a connection between soil, weather, and food production by growing a trial crop. Learning about growing plants is part of the National Science Education Content Standard C: Life Science.
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In the process of discovering the extraordinary creature commonly known as a red wiggler worm—or as scientists would identify it, Eisenia fetida, fifth-grade students recycled their school lunch leftovers, made predictions about worm behavior in compost bins, discovered the process of decomposition, and valued the importance of organic farming methods. Students were able to develop science-process skills (e.g., developing a plan, measuring, constructing, using data, predicting, and communicating) and relate mathematical procedures in a significant way, all while their worms processed those lunchroom leftovers into organic plant food!
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