Rooting for You

Challenge
Looking for something to do inside or outside? Why not start a garden? You could choose to plant flowers, vegetables, or different kinds of plants. You can find vegetable seeds almost in any vegetable in your house. The beginning of May is the perfect time to start planting! Find those seeds and plant them in a pot with some soil. Your challenge this week has to deal with planting. How will they grow best? What do they need? How much of that do they need? Can you create some kind of experiment, tracking the data, to find out? Try it with multiple seeds, different kinds of plants, different amounts or kinds of soil, different places outside or inside (shady or sunny), different amounts of water, or anything else you can think of to experiment.

Your experiment does have some criteria and constraints. Make sure to collect data on your plants. Before beginning make a hypothesis about which will grow the best and why. After completing the experiment, make a claim about how to grow the plant best by using evidence and reasoning.

Materials

• various vegetable seeds
• various soils (sand, potting soil, dirt, etc.)
• data tools (notebook, ruler, scale, etc.)
• pots or containers for planting

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Hints and Tips for Success

1. Use empty egg cartons to start out the seeds. Place one seed in each holder. These can easily be cut apart too for different sections. The different sections could represent either different seeds or the different experiment types.
2. Make sure to do multiple examples of the same experiment. Plant 3-4 seeds the same way to ensure fair trials.
3. Collect data the same way for each plant by measuring, weighing (if possible), when the plant is placed, and recording the amount of water added.
4. Be patient!