Science: Botany

I'm using the curriculum standards from Core Knowledge (http://www.coreknowledge.org/) and the NJ Dept of Education Core Curriculum Standards.

We've been growing beans and seeds and doing simple plant experiments, like putting a carrot in water and seeing what happens. We put kidney beans in damp tissue paper wrapped in foil, one or two a day over the course of a week. Then we unwrapped them and arranged them in order of least to most developed, talking about germination. We did some experiments with this. Like, with some beans we tried using too much water - she thought it was fun to use too much water, but then when she smelled the saw the rotting bean she decided not to do that. She designed her own experiment - putting pine needles in a bucket of water to see if they would turn green. The experiment was successful - she learned that they will not turn green through water alone. She also helped improve on the carrot experiment.