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This Needs of Plants lesson plan also includes:
- Living Things and Their Needs - Teacher's Guide
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- The Reading Link
- Lab & Experiment
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What better way to learn about plant life than by creating a class garden? Young botanists start with a brief discussion about radishes before planting seeds and watching them grow. To determine the importance of water, sunlight, and nutrients the class attempts to grow radish seeds in four different environments, recording observations over the course of three or four weeks as they try to identify the needs of plants.
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CCSS:
Adaptable
Concepts
Additional Tags
Instructional Ideas
- With older students, use this lesson to practice measuring length and making graphs to display data
- As an extension, plant other types of seeds and compare their different rates of growth
Pros
- Lesson provides first-hand experience with the life cycle of plants
- Engaging experiment that demonstrates the importance of water, sunlight, and soil for plant life
- Measuring plant growth allows for interdisciplinary connections between math and science
Cons
- Explicit instruction required for describing how the different parts of a plant help it obtain the materials it needs to live