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!
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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!
Check out some of our ideas for Models of Air!
Check out some of our ideas for Models of Light!
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! :-)
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