Thursday, August 1, 2013

Plants Class #7: Wrapping It Up!

For our final class on plants, I put together a "Common Trees of North Carolina" booklet for each of them, gave them a "plants" crossword one of the moms had passed on to me (photocopied, so I don't know where it came from), and played a final rousing game of "plants" bingo. The booklet and crossword were their "prize" at the end of the game.


 

To play the bingo game, I made up nine squares of numbers, 4x4, and filled them somewhat randomly with the numbers 1-34. I had 34 questions prepared on notecards. Each question corresponded to a number, and I shuffled the cards so the questions would come up randomly. If the person had the number on the card and could correctly answer the question, they were allowed to put a chip over the number. This required a bit of honesty on the part of the kids, but I always like to let them know that I trust them by giving them the benefit of the doubt. In any case, this wasn't a problem with this bunch of kids. They would have called each other out if there was anything unfair going on!




If none of the kids with the proper number could answer and someone else could, I let them go ahead and answer. They were very hung-ho and I figured the more they heard the answers the better!

The game took surprisingly long (the whole hour we had anyway) and in the end I was reviewing questions that they had all gotten incorrect the first time around. They LOVED it, and I'm hoping at least these 34 answers got stuck in their heads. If nothing else, they will have learned those few things.

The questions I ended up with are as follows:

1. Name 3 ways seeds get moved around
Wind, animals, water, bursting, humans

2. What kinds of animals pollinate flowers? Name 3.
bees, moths, hummingbirds, geckos, bats, mice, humans

3. On a flower, what is the stamen?
Male (pollen-bearing) part made up of filament and anther

4. What is the female part of the flower called?
Pistil - made up of stigma, style and ovary

5. What kind of flowers do hummingbirds prefer?
red and tubular

6. Name a vegetable that is really a fruit.
tomato, butternut squash, cucumber, zuchinni

7. What is the leaf of a plant for?
To make food for the plant. To do photosynthesis.

8. What are the stoma?
Small pores on the underside of leaves that help the plant to "breathe" and regulate water loss.

9. When we look at a green leaf, is it because the leaf is absorbing green light or reflecting green light?
reflecting

10. What is photosynthesis?
How a plant uses light to make it's own food (sugars) using oxygen and water

11. Can you name a photosynthetic pigment?
chlorophyll, carotenoids (carotine, lutein, xanthohpyll), anthocyannins, betalains

12. Why do leaves often change from green to yellow or red or brown in the fall?
The chlorophyll is often the first to leave the leaf, leaving behind the other pigments

13. What does the xylem do?
Carry water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves

14. What does the phloem do?
Carries food from the leaves to the rest of the plant (down).

15. Why does and oak tree die if you remove the bark from all around the trunk (girdle it)?
The vascular bundles are in a ring under the bark. If you damage all of them the tree will die.

16. What is the stone, amber, made out of?
fossilized tree resin

17. Where do we get maple syrup from?
sugar maple trees

18. Can you name two ways a tree moves things around without using too much energy?
capillary action (cohesion), transpiration, osmosis

19. Where do we get sugar from?
sugar cane or sugar beets

20. What makes a plant different from an animal?
Don't move, photosynthesis, cell walls, chloroplasts

21. What does a plant need to live?
space, CO2, water, sunlight, nutrients

22. Name the different levels of how we classify things.
Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species

23. The latin name for crabgrass is Digitaria ischaemum. How do we fit this into the classification scheme?
Genus and Species

24. Who came up with the system of classification we use today to classify all of life?
Carl Linneus

25. What Kingdom are plants in?
Plantae

26. What makes a fern different from a flowering plant?
a fern has spores instead of seeds

27. What is the scientific name from flowering plants?
Angiosperms

28. Is a pine tree a flowering plant?
No, it is a gymnosperm

29. Name two ways a monocot and a dicot are different.
Monocots: paralel veins, flower parts in 3's,1 seed leaf, vascular bundles scattered through stem
Dicots: branching veins, flower parts in 4 or 5's, 2 seed leaves, vascular bundles in circles

30. Name one kind of tree native to North Carolina.
long leaf pine, loblolly pine, tulip poplar, red oak, white oak, black oak, sourwood, etc.

31. Name a kind of root we eat.
potato, beet, carrot, garlic, onion, sweet potato, etc.

32. Name a seed carried by the wind.
dandelion, maple seeds, etc.

33. Name a seed carried by water.
coconut, mangrove, sea bean, sea heart

34. Why do plants make fruit and nectar?
To encourage and reward animals to move their seeds and pollen around.

Of course, if they came up with an answer that I had not thought of that was true, I gave it to them. A lot of the acceptance or denial of answers required some judgement calls on my part. Once or twice I asked the group to decide if an answer was acceptable. 

I won't lie. Putting this class together was a lot of work for me. The hardest part was not the finding of the information, but deciding what to present and how to present it. By the end I was really ready to be done with it all. However, putting something like this together allows me to review and re-learn a great deal of stuff I may have forgotten. It really is true that homeschooling allows you to learn along-side your kids and it reaffirms the idea that learning happens throughout life.

I really appreciated the kids in this class. They stuck with me, even when I was going on about how to classify plants. As ever, the goal was to get some information to stick while having fun, and hopefully we accomplished that.

I've put all of this up in the hopes that the framework I ended up using will help some others out there when facing a group (or maybe just one or two) of 3rd - 5th graders who want to learn a few things about plants. I did review a great deal of material, discarding some stuff because it was just too hard to transport, took too long, or seemed too dumbed down (or conversely over their heads).

Now on to other things, like deciding what to do for science this year!

2 comments:

  1. These are all fantastic resources...I am sure they took a lot of time and effort, but they are so useful. I am teaching an earth science class for our co-op this fall and I have been reading through your geology lessons pretty carefully. Thanks for sharing!

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  2. You're welcome! Glad to help!

    ReplyDelete