Roots

This week's lesson went very well, but there was a ton of setting up to do and there was a lot of information to cover within a one hour period.  I felt that we were moving along at a good speed and there was not much time being wasted because the students were especially well behaved this week, but we were clenched for time, so I wonder if the lesson from the kit may be a bit too difficult for this grade level.  The lesson was about roots, and the students did not know too much about roots other than the very basics, so we had to teach a lot of material before we could move onto the activity.  The students were really interested to learn that the parts of a plant that we can see is only about half of the plant's true size because of the extensive root system that is hidden underground.  We used the ELMO to show images of two different types of trees that we were discussing in order to show the students how some extensive root systems can be in different parts of the world depending on their climate and surrounding environment, which they thought was really cool.  We showed them a picture of a mangrove tree, which has such an extensive root system that it catches all of the soil particles and debris from the flowing river like a net, forming new land over time as a result.  We also showed them a picture of a great banyan tree, which has branches that grow out of the trunk of the tree and into the ground in order to support the tremendous size of the tree and its enormous canopy.

After discussing the significance of root systems, and that they act as both anchors and as a means of bringing water and nutrients up to the plant, we began our activity.  This week's activity was planting cucumber seeds in test tubes with sand, clay, and humus (three tubes per pair of students, one of each sample) in order to see which soil component would support the most extensive root system.  This activity was pretty difficult for the students because there were a lot of tricky parts to it that required the use of fine motor skills, such as pouring the soil components into the small test tubes without spilling it all over their desks.  The test tubes were open on both ends, so the students had to put a cotton ball in the bottom of their tubes in order to keep the soil components from falling through the bottom (which was how the kit designed the activity), but once the students began slowly adding water to the samples, the cotton balls got wet and they began falling out.  Alyssa and I had to circulate through the classroom and help out almost every group for one reason or another, and I just feel that the activity may have been a bit over their heads.  Overall, the activity went pretty well even though there were some difficulties that popped up along the way, and the students surprisingly remained calm and quiet throughout the lesson.  Before launching into the activity, we showed the students another BrainPop video that discussed root systems, and the students can't get enough of it!  They love sitting at the rug and watching the videos, and they think Moby is hilarious.  We had planned to incorporate engineering and technology into our lesson, but we simply did not have time due to the length of the activity itself, so we will be sure to touch upon it in next week's lesson.