If you teach the North Carolina science standards and are overwhelmed by all the possible growing plants experiment ideas, don’t worry! I have your list for where to start to make your planning a breeze. When you consider each of my growing plants in classroom activity, you can guarantee that it will directly support third grade standards.
In addition, these plant activities are highly engaging, low to no cost and simple to prep. Your students will connect to the natural world around them and start to develop a love of plants all while learning important science content. Any or all of these experiments can be used for a plant life cycle lesson or unit.
Start a new plant unit by taking a walk (preferably in the spring – but any season can work). Look for signs of plant life (or death or dormancy). Give students journals and allow them to sketch and record what they observe. See if students can recognize any plan parts and label them as an open-ended pre-assessment observation. If it is warm enough, see if students can find and identify any pollinators (butterflies, bees, etc.)
Ask your students to sketch and write all that they know about the relationship of the pollinators to plants. This will also give you pre-teaching information about student’s familiarity with pollination. Be sure to announce expectations ahead of time about collecting any specimens from nature and if students are allowed to bring anything back to the classroom from their walk.
Using ziploc bags, tuck a couple of lima beans inside a damp but not soaking towel. Tape the bag on a sunny window and watch the bean plant grow each day! Leave a space open at the top of the bag for air flow and change out the damp towel as needed so the beans don’t start to rot.
Keep a plant observation journal and look for different plant parts and life cycle stages. Make sure to water but not overwater the beans. Special plant growing re-usable bags with suction cups can be purchased but regular zip loc bags and tape work well too.
A quick search for local business will probably give you several contacts of plant experts in your area. Most passionate plant business owners are excited to come and share their plant expertise with students. The business owners also mutually benefit from the experience as a free advertisement to families.
These types of connections have led my class to awesome in-class plant experiences. This partnership is also a way for plant business owners to expand their business using school parking lots to sell native plants to families both as school fundraisers and as a service to help the environment by encouraging people to plant more native plants in their yards.
Are you ready to jump in and start your plant experiments with your students? Grab this plant vocabulary freebie and get started teaching plant vocabulary words today!
When studying plant parts, collecting leaves is an easy, free and simple activity that can lead to great conversations about structure and function as well as how plants make food through photosynthesis.
This activity works well in the fall when students have an abundance of leaves to collect on the ground. However, if your school has plenty of trees on campus, there should be leaves around most of the year. Let students know if they are allowed to pick off leaves that are still attached to living trees or if they need to observe and leave the leaves.
If your school already has a designated garden area, starting your study of plants in this location would be a great introduction. Students can start with a KWL chart and record what they know about plants, what they want to learn (questions) and then later what they have learned about plants.
If your school already has a designated garden area, starting your study of plants in this location would be a great introduction. Students can start with a KWL chart and record what they know about plants, what they want to learn (questions) and then later what they have learned about plants.
Need help teaching plant vocabulary? Grab these free word cards to get started!
Gardening is usually a popular hobby and if you send out a request, you might be surprised at how quickly families might volunteer to start a garden club, donate or lend out gardening supplies or even share their expertise if they have special gardening skills. At my school, there were so many parents that wanted to help start a garden club that school staff didn’t have to do any planning or recruiting.
Parents donated, volunteered and created beautiful garden spaces with their students all around campus. This gave so many opportunities for plant lessons and parent visits to explain the latest garden project. We even had parents plant native plant seeds to grow in small containers for several months outside our classroom window as students observed. When spring arrived, they returned to plant the seedlings in flower beds to enjoy year after year at our school.
Speaking of planting seeds, using a more mature indoor succulent plant to propagate allows students to learn how to care for their own plant at school and when they take it home. I had another plant expert bring in propagated succulents for my students from her home collection.
This was very low cost since all the baby plants grew off of a plant she already owed and cared for at her home. This is another exciting way to get students to have ownership over their learning.
A fun way for students to explore the structure and function of seeds with dissecting lima beans that have been soaking overnight. Students can slice open the soaked beans and observe the tiny baby plant growing inside. This is also a great way to introduce the beginning of the seed to seed life cycle.
Speaking of bean seeds, your students could also try a seed walk outside (if the season and weather permits) or you can bring in (or ask students to bring in) a variety of seeds from the outdoors or their pantry. Students can sort seeds in different ways and see how many different categories they can come up with to sort with.
This activity provides a lot of opportunity to discuss descriptive language and different ways to categorize the seeds. Hopefully some one might think of categories of seeds by shape or by method of travel. If not, you can nudge them towards thinking about how different seeds travel (if you have some examples).
It’s fun to practice dropping different seed shapes to determine seed dispersal methods. Seed dispersal is the movement or transport of seeds away from the parent plant via wind, water, animals, gravity, or explosion. Common types include wind-blown dandelion seeds, water-transported coconuts, animal-dispersed berries, hooked burrs, and explosive pods. The seed dispersal can lead into a lesson about how this reduces competition for resources for seeds and ensures that plants colonize.
Grab some celery stalks (it can even be ones that are too old to eat and about to be tossed) and have students plop them in glass water cups or vases with colored water. Use different colors of food coloring in each container for as many celery stalks you want to use.
Students will be amazed to see the leaves and top of the celery turn the color of the water as the celery stalk soaks up the colored water. This hands-on experiment will help students remember that stems and leaves soak up water and nutrients from the roots of a plant.
Speaking of fun colors, bring in some photos (or even better) real life flowers like carnations or roses that have been plopped in different colored water similar to the celery stalks. Students will likely make the connection that flower petals also receive nutrients and water from stems (especially if you have already done the celery experiment).
If you bring in the rainbow flowers before the celery, you can use this phenomenon to have students make predictions about why the flower petals are rainbow. Even though it seems obvious to adults, kids often think someone has painted the petals different colors!
While you are on the hunt at a florist for rainbow flowers (unless you decide to just use a photo), you can easily ask a manager for any slightly wilted flowers that are no longer able to be sold. Most florists are happy to donate flowers that would otherwise have to be trashed, especially when they discover that children will be using them to learn about plants.
One time when I asked for a flower donation, I walked out of a local business with an entire trunk full of flowers! My car never smelled (or looked) so good! This was right after Easter and there were many lilies that were still in pretty good shape but not at peak performance for a sale. My students got busy dissecting them the next day during science and loved separating out all the different parts to label, trace and observe.
My classroom smelled amazing and my students got to take home a couple of the best flowers to their families because we were so full of flowers and needed some space back! This hands-on experience definitely piqued their curiosity about flower parts that depend on pollination from pollinators. We were able to naturally start learning about the process of pollination from this experiment.
Another option is to take a field trip to a grocery store to look for different plant parts in the produce section. Many grocery stores offer free field trips and are eager to schedule an experience for students because it’s also an opportunity to give back to the community with free advertising!
Knowing that I wouldn’t have the time to bring my class to look at the fresh fruits and vegetables one year, I started snapping photos of different plant parts for my students to study. The manager was quickly by my side asking about what I was doing. After he found out my goal, he was very enthusiastic about setting up an in person event for students to learn more about plants that we eat!
These real world connections are what makes the learning about food so interesting to students. Not only could students take notes or complete activities at the grocery store about plant parts but there are plenty of ways math could be another subject area integrated into word problems about prices and quantities of items in the grocery store.
Towards the end of your plant unit, you can ask students to construct a plant model out of different materials provided or simply with paper and colors. Students can make labels to place on different parts of the model or draw them onto the paper of a 2-D plant model.
To check for understanding, you could also ask students to describe the function of each of the parts of their plant or flower. I have asked students to imagine the flower is a “factory” and each part has a role to play for each “department” in the factory.
Sometimes I use this final project as a performance assessment to see what students learned about the structure and function of part of plants as well as the life cycle of plants.
If you are up for a little more prep and material gathering, letting students grow plants in different conditions is a great way to simulate different environmental conditions. You can let students label different areas of plants and set up conditions such as no light, no water, no nutrients/ fertilizer, no soil, etc.
Comparing the growing rates of these different conditions will spark great real life conversations about the importance of location and season when you decide to plant. Also, this can lead to conversations about how the Earth is cared for and becoming more environmentally conscious.
In addition to light and water, students are naturally curious about the importance of soil. If you have already tried the lima bean experiment in the bag, students will have already seen an example of how seeds don’t necessarily have to have soil to grow. They do, however, need space. You can give other examples of bulbs or air plants that don’t need soil to grow and then ask why this might be.
Students will want to investigate soil and you can probably easily find a sample right outside your classroom. Make sure to scout out an area ahead of time to dig different types of samples if possible before you take your class to collect soil on your school campus.
If you can find a spot with more sand, a spot with more clay and a spot with more hummus or topsoil, you will be able to explore different soil types without going far outside your classroom. If you live in an area that doesn’t have a wide variety of soil or it’s not easily accessible, consider bringing in a sample of sand, a sample of clay and a sample of humus.
Collect some glass mason jars and allow students to fill the jar with water and the soil samples. Shake it up with the lid on tight and let it settle out for a day or so. Students can watch the soil layers separate in the jar as time goes on.
Use this opportunity to teach students about different soil types and why they settle at different layers in a jar of water. Students can use their new soil knowledge to attempt to label the soil labels in their “Soil Shake Jar.” Make sure they understand that it’s not a soil shake to drink!
You can also use different soils to try planting different types of seeds as another variable in a growing experiment. Different seeds grow well in different types of soil so if you select a seed that grows well in each soil type, it should be interesting to compare what happens after all seeds are given a chance to grow.
This can lead to an interesting lesson on why farmers plant certain crops in certain areas and why soil can have an important impact on plant growth. The environmental connection can be looped in here again as well. If humans don’t take care of our Earth, our Earth won’t have the right conditions to grow all our food!
If you want to press the easy button and have all the details planned for you, I have everything you need and more to teach about plant structure and function, plant life cycles, soil types and how environmental conditions affect plant growth in my Plant Unit for Third Grade NC Science.