Last week (yes, I’m a little behind) we read Jack and the Beanstalk, which ties in nicely to my seeds and planting theme.  We began by reading Jack and the Beanstalk (the version by Little Golden Books).  When we finished reading the story, we noticed that there was a large note hanging on our Morning Message paper:

The Giant had left us a message and some of his footprints:

The directions in his note were to find things that were the same length, longer than, and smaller than his footprints:

Tuesday, I gave the children plates of beans (the same ones from the previous week that they had already sorted).  This time, I asked them to come to a consensus at their table about which 5 beans that their table would plant and care for.  That was interesting!!  We planted them in clear plastic gloves so that the children could watch them grow and change over time:

I asked the children to make sure that they all planted at least one lima bean and then asked them to consider these questions as they chose their beans. 

Here they are hanging in the window. 

I introduced the word hypothesis today and the children though about what kinds of beanstalks that their various beans would grow. Some one asked if there was a way to see inside the beans. 

Wednesday, I asked the children if they could figure out a way that we could see inside the beans.  They concluded that they knew that seeds opened once they had been planted so one of the things that was used to plant them must be the thing we would need.  We made a list of things (sun, water, soil, love, air) and checked each one of the things off on our list.  We decided that we had planted seeds in soil on Monday, so that was taken care of.  We held our beans up to our hearts and talked to them (love) and although that did not work, it was awfully cute to watch!  We also tried holding the beans up in the air and nothing happened.  Finally, we decided that our experiment to see inside the beans would involve sun and water.  Our hypothesis was that one of these ways was sure to make the beans open so that we could see inside them!

We also decided to use our greenhouse rather than take the beans outside.  Some of the children were worried that squirrels and other animals might take the beans and we would not see what happened to them. 

In the greenhouse.

Soaking in water.

We determined when we would check on them and also wanted to write something down to show what we were doing:

Thursday, we noticed that the beans that were soaking in the water had expanded and cracked open, so we used magnifying glasses to check them out (I was at Science Academy, so there are no photos for this!! Sorry!)

The children then got to plant beans of their own to take home and observe.

Because we had quite a few steps involved in planting these beans, we made a list of “Lab Notes” so that the children could refer back to them if they forgot what to do next:

That was our week last week…now on to this week!

Kristen 🙂