🌑 Beans in the dark and in the light: the whole packet

🌑 Beans in the dark and in the light · 2nd–6th grade · 10 days of testing · about $2 · 15 minutes a sitting

My days, if the fair is 14 days away

Count back from your fair day and write in each date. Fewer days than this? The jobs share days, in this order; nothing is skipped.

Dates from my teacher

• My question is due
• Testing starts
• My results table and graph are due
• My board is due

In this packet

1. 🗓️ My project plan
2. 💭 My hypothesis
3. 🧺 Change, measure, keep the same
4. 🪜 My steps
5. 📊 My results
6. 📓 My logbook
7. ✅ My conclusion
8. ✂️ Board titles to cut out
9. 🏅 The judge's questions and my certificate

If I change how much light the bean plant gets, then how tall the plant grows in ten days will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

3 levels × 3 tries at each = 9 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 🫘 Dried beans from the grocery bag (pinto, lima or kidney): 9, all the same kind
• 🥤 Paper cups with a hole poked in the bottom: 9, all the same
• 🪴 Potting soil
• 🍽️ A baking tray or big plate: 3, one for each place
• 🚰 Water from the tap
• 🥛 A measuring cup
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines
• 🖍️ Crayons or markers
• 📏 A ruler

Be safe: 👶 Small parts · 🧼 Wash your hands after · 🚫 Test food is not for eating

1. Soak nine beans in a cup of water overnight.
2. Fill nine cups with potting soil to 2 cm below the rim.
3. Push a bean a finger deep into each cup, and water each with a quarter cup of tap water.
4. Label the cups dark, shady and sunny, three of each.
5. Put three cups on a tray in a dark cupboard, three on a tray in a shady room and three on a tray in a sunny window.
6. Every day, give each cup the same quarter cup of water, and peek at the cupboard quickly.
7. On day ten, take the cups out and stand a ruler beside each plant to measure its height.
8. Write each height in your table, and write down each plant's colour and how thick its stem is.
9. Draw a bar graph of the height for each place.
10. Wash your hands after touching the soil.

Write each number in your results table the moment you measure it.

I changed: Light   I measured: how tall the plant grows in ten days (cm)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: light along the bottom, cm up the side)

What I noticed: ______________________________________________

Write something every day you work on it, even the days you only gather things. More days? The three-page logbook prints from peabody.kids/science-fair/templates/logbook.

My hypothesis was ☐ right ☐ partly right ☐ not right.

I know because my numbers show:

What surprised me, or what might have gone wrong (7th and up):

Next time I would test:

Idea: Change a second thing: give the plants 2, 6 and 12 hours of light a day, and graph their heights against the hours of light.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: does a bean grow taller in the dark?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing how much light the bean plant gets would change how tall the plant grows in ten days, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed how much light the bean plant gets (Dark cupboard, Shady room, Sunny window) and measured how tall the plant grows in ten days in cm.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same kind of bean, soaked overnight and the same cups, soil and amount of water the same, so only how much light the bean plant gets was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 3 levels, and I found the middle number.
6. What did you find out? Show me in your numbers. Say something like: Look at my table: Dark cupboard and Sunny window gave different numbers, and here's the pattern.
7. Was your hypothesis right? How do you know? Say something like: My numbers show whether I was right, partly right or not, and I can show you where.
8. Did anything go wrong, or surprise you? Say something like: One try was odd, so I did it again and wrote it in my logbook.
9. If you did it again, what would you change or test next? Say something like: I'd change a second thing: give the plants 2, 6 and 12 hours of light a day, and graph their heights against the hours of light.