Science Experiments Galore!

Today we started our new unit in Science.  We started by writing our beginning thinking about "What plants are?"  Already the kiddos have a good understanding of what plants need to survive and what plants are.

 Today we dug a little deeper.

We talked about what plants need to survive.  The kids did GREAT listing what plants need to survive, but they couldn't tell me why.  We are now conducting an experiment to become experts and be able to tell others why a plant needs water, air, soil, and sunlight to survive.
We each have a control plant that will have all of the things needed to survive.  Each one of us will have an experiment plant that will have every thing except for one of the items needed to survive.  One group has soil, air, and sunlight but no water, one group has water, air, and sunlight but no soil, one group has soil, water, and sunlight but no air and the last group has soil, water, and air but no sunlight.  We will journal about our beginning thinking and then monitor the different experiments through the next few weeks.  Our control will then become gifts for our moms for Mother's Day.

We also know the parts of a plant but we don't know their purpose.  These are things that we will learn about in our science unit.

James and the Giant Peach

This coming May our first grade class will have the opportunity to go to The Rose Theater in Omaha, Nebraska http://www.rosetheater.org/ to see a production of James and the Giant Peach.  To prepare in class we are reading the novel and creating a story timeline and writing and illustrating our chapter summaries in our journals.  We have just started the book, but already they are asking at every free moment for me to read more.  We can't wait to find out what kind of adventures James and his friends will go on.