Explorations, Observations, and Challenges Accepted!

Over the last two weeks, we've had many opportunities to get outside and explore as scientists. We've even been able to get out in our school garden to do some late summer harvesting of our plants! 

We found lots of different kinds of plants in the garden (including flowers and vegetables!) and we were able to see that all of these plants had leaves, roots, and stems. 

We noticed lots of veggies growing above the soil on different kinds of plants that were ready for picking. We were able to pick a lot of these veggies and do some taste testing in our class! We tried tomatoes, cucumbers, and green bell peppers. All of these veggies tasted different, but we noticed all of them had seeds inside. 

We were back out in the garden this week, and this time we were able to find some plants that grew underground! We found a potato and some carrots under the soil in addition to the tomatoes still growing on the plants above the ground. 

While both the carrots, potatoes, and tomatoes all had stems and leaves growing above the ground, we discovered the part of the plant that we eat grows in different places depending on the plant. We learned that veggies like carrots and potatoes are called "root vegetables" because the carrot and potato we eat are part of that plant's roots. 

We even found a little love in the garden! 

We've also begun to meet with our 2P Science Buddies! We will be meeting with our puffin pals throughout the year to explore different science topics and STEM projects, and this week we've been working on observing, working together, and getting to know one another (ask your giraffe about the game Huggle Huggle Beanstalk! It is a fun way to practice observations and would be a great game to play at home)

When we came up with our Hopes and Dreams for Science Buddies, we decided we wanted to be able to work together and to work on STEM Challenges, so our first STEM Challenge was the Paper Chain Challenge. Our buddies worked together in small group of 5-6 to make the longest paper chain they could. The challenge? They only had 2 pieces of paper, 2 ft of masking tape, and one pair of scissors. To top it all off, they only had 15 minutes to build their chains! 

After our 15 minutes were up, we all got together to compare our chains. We noticed one chain was much longer than the rest! That group had no supplies left--they even used some of their leftover tape to make chain loops once they ran out of paper! The group said everyone took turns with different jobs and they build their chain from both sides. 

One group said their plans changed after they began working. Initially, they were cutting lots and lots of small pieces of paper to make their chains, and while their chain had lots of links, it wasn't very long. They looked around them and realized other groups had bigger chain links which made their chain longer and used less tape, so they switched strategies! 

Many of the giraffes and puffins felt like their groups were very big, so next time we meet, we will try the challenge again knowing what we know now with smaller groups to see how our results change!