Plant Investigations

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.

There is some argument about what they specifically need, so many experiments will help with this.  We also know that watching a plant grow in our own classroom can be painfully slow, so we're thankful for our researcher scientist friend (a connection with Mrs. Brinza) who runs plant experiments all the time.  We're using his data while we wait to design our own plant investigations.

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!