Reading with Buddies

We love reading with our 5th grade buddies.

Twin Day

We've had a lot of fun dressing up for Spirit week. Although I haven't gotten whole-group pictures of each day, we did get some good shots from Twin Day. Take a look!

What Parts of Plants Do We Eat?

In our ongoing discussion about plants, our friend Hanna made a great inquiry when she wondered "What roots do we eat?" This question prompted lots of thoughts and strong feelings from our class, and we debated the topic for quite some time before deciding that we needed to look into this question in more depth.

We began our inquiry by reading the book Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens. In this book, Hare continues to outwit Bear. He and Bear share crops by splitting the plants in half. Hare asks Bear which part of the plant he wants: the tops or the bottoms. Bear begins by choosing the tops as he is certain they will yield more food, but Hare is quick to choose plants such as carrots and radishes to plant that season so that the bottoms are more fruitful. Hare continues to adjust his planting accordingly so that he gets all the food and Bear is left with nothing but the scraps.

This book made us realize that we eat more roots than we know! We were surprised to find out that carrots are roots. In realizing that we do indeed sometimes eat the roots of plants, the question then arose as to what other parts of plants we eat on a regular basis. To explore this question, we first had to learn the different parts of plants:

Our next step was to brainstorm the plant parts that we already know we eat. These are a few of our thoughts:

 It was evident quite quickly that most of us didn't think we ate flowers or stems, and very few of us were able to think of any leaves. With this information in mind, it was time to explore. 

Kacey brought in a variety of plant food items for us to take a look at, and we decided the best way to organize them was sorting by parts of the plant we eat. 

We were amazed to find out that we eat all the different parts of plants! We found out that sometimes we eat just one part of a plant (such as when we eat just the leaves of spinach), but in other plants we eat multiple parts (like when we eat both the stem and flower of broccoli). This opened our eyes and minds to wondering what we might be eating for snack! We quickly gathered our snacks and began exploring them. We then used our same sorting method to identify which parts of plants we were eating that day. How amazed we were to see that every one of us had some sort of plant product in our snack!

Finally, we revisited our brainstorming sheets to see what we could add to the plant parts we eat. We saw that we learned a lot when comparing our initial thoughts with our closing thoughts. Stay tuned for a post with some of us talking about all we learned.

I used to think.......

Now I think......