S.T.E.A.M. Room May 2018

Shhhhhhh……our seeds are sleeping….snug inside their seed coats, just waiting for spring to awaken them!

This is the fun the S.T.P. students engaged in during their May steam adventure. To the tune of “Peanut, Peanut Butter and Jelly,” we all sang and danced the Earth’s special recipe for our food: Soil, seed, sun and water.

Using “A Seed is Sleepy,” a wonderful and beautifully illustrated book by Dianna Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long, we investigated the many unique qualities of seeds….their various shapes, sizes, colors as well as how adventurous they are, how far they are able to travel, how inventive they are in hitching a ride on our shoe laces or in other ways… As soil scientists we got down and dirty and dug soil samples as a team from different areas around our school and took a close look at what each team found. Worms, mealy bugs, larvae, rocks, sand, clay, sticks….we discovered that soil has many components and needs many of them to be healthy and feed our seeds and plants. Using strips of recycled newspaper, we made decomposable plant pot homes for our mammoth sunflower seeds which we planted with the recipe we learned: soil, seed, sun and water! The tiny pots, watered and ready to go into the garden accompanied each student home during the last few days of school. Fingers crossed we did a thorough job of waking up our seeds…if we did, there will be lovely 8 foot or larger sunflowers smiling in many family gardens at the end of summer!