Raising Seedlings in the Classroom

If you're in an area with a short growing season and/or you want to harvest certain crops before school is out, you can get a jump on the season by raising your own seedlings.
You may also want to start seedlings indoors if you are:

• planning a community beautification project
• spring plant sale
• plan to take plants to senior centers, or homeless shelter
• send plants home as gifts.

Raising seedlings in the classroom offers a good opportunity to practice reading and language skills (seed packet instructions), math skills (using seed packet information to determine when to plant), and science process skills (predicting germination times or inferring why seedlings are leggy).

The first challenge will be to determine when you want to have the seedlings ready. A planting calendar is a good source for this determination.

To develop a planting calendar, you will need to know:

• the average last spring frost date in your area (check with local gardeners, the Cooperative Extension service, or weather service);
• the time required from sowing each type of seed to transplanting it outdoors (check seed packets)
• the time from transplanting to harvest if you want to harvest at a particular time (check seed catalogs and packets).

Students can also check seed packets or garden catalogs to find out about frost tolerance, then count back to decide when to plant each crop, and develop a planting calendar. While investigating planting dates, students will also need to find last frost dates for different areas of the country, and discuss why the dates vary. Have students research the origins of some garden plants and report to the class, how their temperature preferences may relate to where in the world the plants originated.

Web site to check for further seed planting information: http://www.seedsonline.com/ssroll.htm

Seed Activity - Same/Different

Materials Needed: a variety of fruits and vegetables, paper plates, fruit and vegetable pictures, overhead/board

Directions: Set up a tray with different fruits and vegetables (apples, cucumbers, oranges, pears, green peppers, and plums).

1. Cut open 1 fruit and 1 vegetable. Ask the students, "What is inside this fruit and this vegetable?" (seeds)
2. Seeds are found in the fruit of the plant. Discuss with the class that a new plant will grow from a seed. Point out the new plant.
3. Cut open the rest of the fruits and vegetables.
4. Place each different seed on a paper plate labeled with a picture of the fruit or vegetable from which seed came.
5. Ask the students to describe each seed by color.
6. Repeat for size (big, small), shape (flat, round), and feel of the covering (smooth, rough).
7. Record answers on overhead/board in chart format.
8. Divide class into teams.
9. Have each team of students work together to sort and classify the seeds examined into the four groupings.
10. Count the number of seeds for each fruit and vegetable that has been observed and make a bar graph.
11. Plant some of the seeds that the class has examined.
12. Have students bring in seeds from different fruits and vegetables.

Assessment:

1. Have students describe ways the seeds are different.
2. Evaluate the effectiveness of students' seed classification systems.

Click here for printable version.

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