IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Last week, we came up with many questions about plants and how they grow. This week, we decided to investigate two of those questions with an experiment.

Question #1- Can plants grow in sand?

Question #2- Can plants grow without soil?

 In our new grow lab, we have three pots with lima beans inside them. We talked about how our first pot is our control group, the regular lima bean in classic potting soil. The second has a seed in sand. The third has a lima bean in a paper towel. We will monitor the growth each day to see what grows, and which grows the strongest/tallest/fastest. We also read a book with Mr. Henderson about the importance of light on plants and Photosynthesis. We learned that leaves are like little kitchens that make food for the plant. Photosynthesis (the cooking of the food) is done by using light. Our grow lab has an artificial light that will be on while we are at school. It will also turn on for a short while during the evening, to give our plants lots of adequate light.

We have also begun talking about weather and the effects it may have on our garden. We wrote a letter to Mrs. Bucher’s class on Monday asking for them to teach us a little bit about weather. Yesterday, several friends came over to our class and brought a new tool to show us- an anemometer. This tool measures wind speed, it also had a thermometer and rain gauge on it.  To learn more about it and how it worked, we took it outside- wow did it move! The wind was so fast the anemometer top spun around and around. We also paid attention to how quickly the temperature dropped from inside to outside. We will continue to observe the weather and talked about its changes in November. We even created a weather graph to start tracking the weather in November!

Tags: capable, garden, project, scientific method

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