An Organized Mess: Earth Day 2014

So, Earth Day is always such a fun day! Kids love doing research on the Earth, experiments on how to save it and projects galore! This year Shauna found a global project that included a pretty basic concept, planting seeds and learning about the plant life cycle. It is called the Full of Beans Global Project, there are 60 classes around the world participating and each one of them have their own Wiki site and planted their seeds/beans on the same day!

We decided to do Lima beans, take the easy route and have everyone put three beans in a moist paper towel and hang them on the window. To make it more of a project I decided to give every child a kid blog to record their data, they have to answer questions every few days based on their observations and I figure if I can connect them to the outside world they may make more in depth observations then just color and size.

We are also doing line plots and graphs in math, so we will be collecting data on the growth of the beans to turn it into a line graph and extract data from the line graph about their success or failure of the bean.

To include our reading group we had them read Wonderful World of Plants (shared via Google Apps to make as little copies as possible) and then they had to research the history of Earth Day and create a Haiku Deck of their research.

I'm really excited to see how this project goes, we planted the left over seeds in the garden beds outside of our pod to extend the experiment to see if they grow faster/better in soil or a paper towel.