In an effort to educate others about all our learning in our Roadkill Unit, we decided to make a picture book (available for online viewing)!  In our water unit, we decided to make posters to educate others, so we found this decision very fitting!

Students have intensively learned how to use Google Drawing this year, and we decided to put it to good use.  Students designed all the characters, and then worked as collaborative tables to write and edit one page of the story.  We hope you enjoy them!

So once we figured out that we COULD possibly connect this plant growth phenomenon back to the anchoring phenomenon of the dead raccoon, we set off to work!  Using all the organisms we figured something out about throughout our study, we connected them together from what we had learned from a both a matter and energy perspective.  Here are the two classes' final models!

It was surely a heavy lift as a class to create, discuss, and improve our work over two days.  But at the end of it, students felt super successful at what they accomplished!

We're going back to the Driving Question Board one more time to see if there are any questions that we left that we can either now answer, or research the answers to.  Way to go 5th grade! We've got some questions about odors, what flies and birds eat, and  what rot is exactly! 

After looking at each group's revised model of how plants grow, we had a lot to reflect upon.  So we sat in a scientists' circle and students recognized that they were certainly critical of others (and maybe we're the most keen on getting feedback from others they admitted).

So we set off to see how we could best represent this "plant growth" phenomenon, and decided the best way to show plant growth was with two plants--a before and an after.

We had an interesting conversation about what was really happening with the air and water as the plant was using it to grow.  We figured out that as the plant was getting bigger, the air and water would have to be getting smaller.  Ultimately (and somehow in a process we don't really get yet in 5th grade), the air and water become a taller plant or a new plant part.  Of course, this only happens when light energy is present.  

Mrs. Brinza found some pom-poms, and we built a physical model to show this:

We agreed that it was time to connect all the stuff we figured out back to the anchoring phenomenon for our unit--the dead raccoon!  Students suggested we revise our model yet again, to show what happens to the raccoon and answer our Driving Question for the Unit, "Why do dead things disappear?"

So after looking at all our initial models and looking for similarities and differences between models, we set off to revise our initial thinking based on the evidence we've gathered so far.  Students established the criteria for their revised models to be:

1.  Matter as pieces (air and water)
2.  Plant growth shown
3.  Light present (but not as pieces/particles, because it's energy, NOT matter)
4.  Simple, neat, and labeled, with an explanation of the phenomenon

Here are their models!

Since we figured out that matter and energy are different things, we decided to swing back around and make sense of what we figured out about how plants get their matter and how matter can be represented at a zoom-in level as particles!

Students developed initial models to explain where plants get the matter they need to grow (since we've figured out the difference between matter and energy, energy being the ability to get stuff to move, heat up, or be powered). 

​Here is a look at their initial models:

We completed a "silent gallery walk" where students offered critical feedback to their peers.  Here's a sampling of their feedback!  How thoughtful!

And from there, we discussed the similarities and differences of our models to revise them and work towards establishing consensus!

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!