We've  put so many pieces together regarding how organisms grow bigger by eating, how plants get their matter and energy (since they don't eat like animals), and how organisms "disappear" when they're dead.  I am so proud of you 5th grade, especially since much of our figuring out has been remote. Way to go!  

Check out some of our  newspaper articles to summarize all of our thinking!  YAY!

When our unit first started in February, we had no clue we'd be back where we started after we figured out so much stuff!  Our original question was "Why do dead things disappear?"  We've certainly figured out this BIG ANSWER!

So here we are in May, and we can do all this crazy connecting between things that not only have disappeared, but things that have gotten bigger, or grown!

Working remotely has certainly presented a challenge, but with all this figuring out we've done, Mrs. Brinza put together a video summarizing everything!

After a thoughtful discussion on what we know about air, water and light, we came to an agreement that:

1. Air is made of matter because it has weight.  If it has weight, it must be made of particles, too! And since air was compressible in a syringe (Mrs. Brinza did a demo w/one of her kid's syringes used to administer medicine), there has to be a lot of empty space around the particles!

2.  Water is also made of particles, too!  Duh--water obviously has weight, no?!?!?!  We also tried it in the syringe and while it's compressible, it was BARELY compressible, which means the particles in water must be really close together.

3. Light doesn't have weight and can't be made of particles, NO WAY!  Since it travels in straight lines and comes from a source, we agreed that an arrow would be the best way to represent it!

Mrs. Brinza built out an animation to see how air, water, and sunlight are used to help a plant grow!

We continued to see another pattern emerge...if an organism gets bigger, then something else (in this case, the air and water) had to be getting smaller!  All this couldn't take place without energy present, too!  Check out our mathematical model we built!

Next steps:  return back to the dead raccoon that started this all!

With our plant investigations in full swing at home, some have done okay and others were total flops, like Mrs. Brinza's!  The beans, while gaining weight, were super mushy and smelly after adding too much water. Mold was even beginning to grow!

So we were grateful for our home investigator's experiments that ran for 20 weeks!  Check out the data that he collected for us, so we can hopefully see where plants are getting their matter from!  We calculated average increase/decrease in weight, and are thinking that plants get their matter from air, water, and sunlight.

We were really intrigued that plants can't be getting their matter from soil, as the vast majority of plants we see grow in them, right?  But we were thinking that if plants are getting bigger, they have to get their pieces from somewhere, and since soil doesn't disappear around plants, this made more and more sense to us!  We looked at the famous experiment from Von Helmont!

From here, we began to ask lots and lots of questions about air, water and light.  Check out some of the students' questions!

We decided in would be in our best interest to actually try and weigh air, water, and light to see if they did indeed have weight, and could give plants matter to grow.  Since we're working remotely and not everyone has an access to a scale, Mrs. Brinza made some videos to showcase this (note the errors I made in saying grams, but the scale was actually in ounces, oops!).  And I apologize for the "homemade" feeling behind the videos, but I'm limited with being able to do high-quality videos with my own-two kids in the background!  

We agreed that water and air must be made of matter since they have weight and take up space.  Air in the big balloon weighed very little, but it still weighed something!  Light, however, didn't weigh anything no matter how much we put on the scale or even the type of light we used.  We closed out the week trying to model what air and light would look like if we zoomed in on them. We already know what water looks like when we zoom in on it (from our Clean/Dirty Water unit). 

Check out some of our ideas for Models of Air!

Next week we'll be discussing these models as we try to finalize our thinking on where plants get their matter from, and what everything else must be if it's not matter!  :-)

With some chatting/discussing what our plant investigations should look like, there was lots of "figuring out" about what a fair test would look like with plants and where they get their matter from.  In our Google Meets, we came up with the following two consensus ideas for what our plants investigations should look like:

Even with the differences, each class has figured out a way to see which of the factors we think will give plants the matter they need to grow!  Since we aren't together physically, we agreed to try and set up our own investigations at home.  Mrs. Brinza set up these:

In the meantime, we're lucky that the scientific community is and has tried something similar to what we've been doing!  So there's this gentleman running a similar experimental setup to ours in his home, too!  We'll check back over time to see how it goes!