So we figured out that air and water are matter because they have weight.  We also figured out to represent air as pieces with lots of empty space around them.  This will hopefully help us model how plants get the matter they need to grow!

But light is throwing us for a loop because maybe our scales just don't have the capacity to register the small amount of matter light may give a plant. But if our scales are actually ok (which Mrs. Brinza thinks they are!), what exactly might light give to plants, if not matter.

Mrs. Brinza set out to help us figure some stuff out about light using a flower toy, a radiometer, and a calculator.  We even watched a movie about chocolate in the sun!

And from all these investigations, we figured this out...

And now that we now that energy and matter must be different things, what does this mean for animals and how they get their energy?  How can we represent this?

So we've figured out that air and water are matter, that they have weight, and that they're made of pieces.  But light is throwing us for a loop because maybe, just maybe, light does have weight but it's so small our scales don't register it.  But maybe it's not matter and it does something else for the plants?

So Mrs. Brinza set out to help us see what plants maybe give to plants, if not matter.  We set up some interesting stations and watched a video, to see what, if anything light gives to plants.  

So we've figured out that plants need air, water, and light. We're pretty certain that air and water are made of matter because when we put these things on the scale, they registered weight.  Light, on the other hand, didn't have any weight, so we're thinking it might not be matter.  We've got some things to figure out there...

So in the meantime, if plants use air and water to grow, how can we represent this? How is it possible that we can add more air to something?

Using a soccer ball and a scale, students saw how we could put more air into it.  We also used some syringes (with our fingers on the top) to see how we could compress and expand the air.  From all our discussions, we realized that like water, air must be made of small pieces, too, with lots of empty space around them!  We established consensus for what this looks like, and we'll be using this evidence as we wrap back around to plants getting the matter they need to grow soon:

So while we figured out that plants need air, water, and light to grow, we're not really sure if they provide the matter plants use to grow.  We planned out the following investigations to prove this:

Water:
*Add water to a cup on a scale to see if increases in weight.  If it does (which we think is super likely, duh!), they we can claim a plant gets its matter from water.  If it doesn't increase, then it's fair to claim water doesn't provide plants with the matter it uses to grow.

***Spolier:  It increased in weight! Water is made of matter!

Air:
*Weigh a balloon before and after you blow it up.  It its weight increases, then air is made of matter, and therefore a plant gets its matter from air, too!  If it doesn't increase, then air isn't made of matter and plants don't use air to grow taller and new body parts, and therefore, increase in weight.

***Spolier:  Air is made of matter.  The weight of the balloon went up by just a little, but that increase still tells us air is made of matter!

Light:
*We were on a roll!  If using a scale to prove that water and air were made of matter, then the same investigation would have to work for light, too!  We made it super dark to have no light on the scale, and then we shined a lot of light on the scale to see if light was made of matter, too.

***Spoiler:  No matter how much light, or even the type of light (artificial vs. natural)...light didn't weigh anything.  Light isn't made of matter and therefore, even though it's needed to help a plant grow, it's not where a plant gets its matter from!

A quick call last night to our science researcher friend got us the data we were curious about! We only have data for four weeks, and were wondering what happened over a longer period of time.  Good thing we've got a connection to someone who takes such copious information down for students!  

​Here's what the data told us:

 We were really interested by what happened in environment #3 and #4.  Not that #1 (light, air and sun) or #2 (air and sun) didn't interest us, too, but #3 and #4 were more heavily discussed for certain!  Environments #1 and #2 showed us that plants don't need soil but that they certainly need water.

Environment #3 was surprising because some of us thought that even with a little air in the jar (we knew it wasn't completely without air), we honestly thought it would have grown.  But over the 12 weeks, there was no change in weight, proving no growth. Plants certainly need air!

Environment #4 was the MOST surprising!  We originally thought that plants didn't need light to grow, as there was a little growth from Week 0 to Week 4, but after Week 8 we saw growth go stagnant and then begin to go down.  This let us figure out that plants do indeed need light to grow.  Without it, they seem to do a little growth, and then none at all, and then they lose weight.  

We decided we will run similar experiments in our class to gather a greater sample size to our science researcher friend's experiment.  We've got about 10 weeks of school left, so we'll see what we find!

For every example we've come across so far, the same thing happens.  One thing in a relationship gets bigger (the weight of a fly's eggs, the larvae that consume the badger, the soil the worms  poop out after eating the dead plants, the mold that decomposes the strawberry).  We've even proven for some of these examples that these things have weight.

But do plants really  get the matter they need to grow from the three things we found out from our experiments?  Are air, light, and water matter?  Plants absolutely need these things, but are they what gives the plants the matter to grow (and ultimately gain weight)?

IF THEY ARE...shouldn't we be able to weigh them like we could weigh anything that was being consumed in any of our other examples?

So yup.  That's what we will do!

We agreed that the best way to figure out how a plant gets the matter it needs to grow is to actually grow plants and see what happens to them in different conditions.  We had quite a lengthy discussion about what this would look like...but in order to do that, we developed some initial models to explain how plants get the matter they need to grow.

From all his data, we made the following claims after he recorded the intial weight and again after four weeks:

There was some fairly alarming things we noticed from his data. The plants TOTALLY grew in the dark!  This was really interesting to us since most of us thought that plants need light to grow.  The data we saw suggested otherwise...that plants don't need light to grow, and they certainly don't need soil to grow.

This got us wondering if maybe he didn't run his experiments long enough.  Mrs. Brinza's going to make a call tonight to see if he ran the experiments longer and get us data over a longer period of time.  Stay tuned!

We're not really sure what they use to grow taller and we're certainly not in agreement...even after students shared their ideas about their own growing plants experiences.  We think they need water for sure, but we're not convinced plants need soil or air.  Some classmates claim they have plants that grow with just air (called air plants) and no water, and others think they need just water.  Whoah--do we have some things to figure out!

Mrs. Brinza also found some plant videos that seem to help us better understand what plants might use for the matter they use to grow.  But some of these videos made us wonder some more things...

All these videos got us noticing and wondering some interesting things as they relate to plant growth and where they get the matter to grow!

 After figuring out that dead stuff gets consumed by different organisms (including us!), we went back to the raccoon that started this whole unit.  We figured out that the adult raccoon that died was probably a baby once (ok, it really was a baby at one time) and that it consumed matter to grow into the adult.  If everything is consuming something, then the raccoon had to consume something once, too!

We did some research to figure out what exactly a raccoon consumes to grow bigger, grow more fur, make offspring, etc., and figured out it would be a good idea to model this, and here were our original ideas...

Using the criteria we set forth and looking at different models, we decided that our scientific model to explain how a raccoon grows should be simple, and we established consensus to look like the picture below. We also figured it was time to official "talk" like scientists, and use words to describe what each of these organisms are:  

When it was all said and done, we were like, "What do the plants eat?"  They were lonely with no arrows going into them...so how do they actually get the matter they need to grow?  Because they grow, right?

We've got a whole bunch of ideas...but there's lots of arguing.  We've got ideas that plants need water, air, sunlight, and soil, but not everyone thinks that all types of plants need all of these things.  Looks like we'll have to be doing something with plants in order to fiture out where plants get the matter they need to grow!

We haven't visited the DQB (Why do dead things disappear over time?) in awhile, so we spent the last few minutes of class doing the following:

1.  Sending each group's manager up to the DQB to pull off a question they believe we can now answer.
2.  Check with their group that it can be answered!
3.  Answer the question on colored paper!
4.  Repeat the process until all questions that could possibly be answered were answered.
​5.  Complete a gallery-walk to see all the questions that could be answered, along with any evidence/new questions that were generated.

Here's our updated Driving Question Board:

And some close-ups of student responses to questions they asked!

So while we all agreed that the mold was consuming the dead fruit in some of our jars (the mold was obviously getting larger while the strawberries were getting smaller), we still weren't entirely convinced about gathering enough concrete evidence about using weight as proof.

So we wondered, "What else consumes dead stuff? That we could weigh?"

US!

So with some bananas in hand and a scale available, we did some eating and weighing...

Our results were pretty interesting and not what we expected.  Out of the ten students weighed between the two classes, only three actually gained the weight of the banana that they ate. We had a pretty good discussion about why this was the case; most likely due to a faulty scale.  We also discussed the importance of a large sample size, because if we had only taken the measurements of say one student, and that student happened to be the one who lost weight, we wouldn't have any data to support our claim that eating make you gain weight and that the weight of the thing being eaten goes down.

From this we've realized a lot...and that there's three big ideas that have surfaced.

1. The living organism that eats gets bigger as it consumes dead stuff.  It's weight increases and the amount of matter in it gets larger.
2.  The dead organism that is being eaten gets smaller and its weight decreases.  It's matter goes into the organism that is consuming it.
3.  Altogether, the amount of matter stays the same in the system...it just gets rearranged.  For example, the dead badger's matter goes into the larger, the dead plants matter goes into the worm or the mold, and the eggs' weight a female fly lays gets larger as she lays them.  The total matter of all these things stays constant, and just moves from organism to organism.

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