lesson plans on plants

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lesson plans on plants
By Vanessa

I teach fifth grade, but I think you can basically follow the same lesson plan that I do.

Get some good potting soil and some seeds. Pea plants grow especially fast. We planted ours on Thursday, and by Monday they had
already sprouted! They also grow quickly.
I have my students use lab sheets, but perhaps you could also put the information on a piece of bulletin board paper. Design a lab sheet which would be simple enough for second grade children to follow. Before you plant the seeds, have them predict how long they think the seeds will take to sprout. They record the predictions on their papers.

When they sprout, take the plant to the front of the room and have a reliable child come up and measure it with a ruler. (Kids are too rough in handling the plants, so you will need to do the measuring with the children.) Have the children write down the day that it sprouted. You can record this information on your paper at the front of the room. Continue measuring every few days and record the growth. Note the information on the charts each time. In the meantime, the kids will be fascinated by the on-going progress with your plant(s). They will observe and notice how much they have grown each day. They will also be practicing their measurment skills.

Eventually, your plants will die in the plastic cups in the classroom. Ours began to struggle after about three weeks. Have the children give reasons why the plant is probably struggling for survival: not enough room in the cup, etc. Of course, if you use plastic cups for planting the seeds, the kids can also observe the roots of the plant. They can see how the plant may be too confined within a cup and really need to be outdoors where there is more natural sunlight, rain, etc.

Have fun with this. My fifth graders loved it.