Thursday, March 19, 2009

¡Holy Frijoles!

As a part of our diversity of life unit, today we began our lesson on plant life. To start this lesson off we used lima beans in class today. We took the beans and compared wet vs. dry to see what effects water has on beans.

We found that once water is added to a lima beans each one began to shed its coat and detach it's embryo. This is apart of a process called germination. Which means it is changing from an organism that is dormant, to an organism that is alive. We were also able to correctly identify the different parts of the bean: embryo, seed coat, and cotyledon.

Mr. McClung

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you going to be conducting any growing experiments with the beans? There was a class I saw last year who grew some from seeds and kept track of it long term online and were regularly recording the results and photographing the efforts. People found it quite interesting. We're doing something similar here with some sandwhiches that are nearly a month old, although all the feedback we've had just seems to indicate people think its gross and disgusting!
Mr Webb and Room 8, Melville Intermediate, Hamilton, Waikato,
New Zealand.

jkmcclung said...

Gross???? That's science!

We have started a side lab, we have planted beans for each class and we will track their growth over the next few weeks.

Anonymous said...

This is one of my favorite experiments that has "instant gratification". The beans sprout so fast, so the kids (me included) don't get bored with the process! I love planting diffent "seeds" to see what happens....Great experiment....hum....think I will go through the pantry to see what I have.lol Another great post....

jkmcclung said...

Your exactly right, instant gratification is a huge plus with this lab....and it is a simply whoa and ahh experiment, they tend to be really surprised at how fast they grow.