🧂 Bean plants and salty, sugary water: the whole packet

🧂 Bean plants and salty, sugary water · 4th–8th grade · 14 days of testing · about $2 · 20 minutes a sitting

My days, if the fair is 18 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 what the bean plants are watered with, then how tall the plant is on day 14 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): 18, 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: 1, to stand the cups on
• 🫙 A clear jar or tall glass: 3, for the liquids
• 🚰 Water from the tap
• 🧂 Salt
• 🍬 Sugar
• 🥛 A measuring cup
• 🥄 Measuring spoons
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines
• 🖍️ Crayons or markers
• ✂️ Kid scissors
• 📏 A ruler

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

1. Soak 18 beans in a cup of water overnight.
2. Fill nine cups with potting soil to 2 cm below the rim, and stand them on a tray.
3. Push two beans a finger deep into each cup, and water each cup with a quarter cup of tap water.
4. Every other day, water every cup with a quarter cup of tap water, until the shoots are up.
5. Snip the smaller shoot in each cup off at the soil, so one plant is left.
6. Pour 2 cups of tap water into each of three jars.
7. Stir 1 teaspoon of salt into one jar and 1 teaspoon of sugar into another, and leave the third plain.
8. Label the jars and the cups, so three cups are plain, three are salty and three are sugary.
9. Every other day, water each cup with a quarter cup from its own jar, and mix fresh jars when they run low.
10. Look at the leaves each week, and write down any that turn yellow or brown.
11. On day 14, stand a ruler beside each plant and measure from the soil to its highest leaf tip.
12. Write each height in your table, in centimetres.
13. Find the mean height for each liquid and draw a bar graph.
14. Pour away the leftover liquids, never drink them, and wash your hands after touching the soil.

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

I changed: Watered with   I measured: how tall the plant is on day 14 (cm)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: watered with 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: water with three amounts of salt, such as a quarter, a half and one teaspoon in 2 cups, and graph the height against the amount.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: does salty or sugary water change a bean plant?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing what the bean plants are watered with would change how tall the plant is on day 14, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed what the bean plants are watered with (Plain tap water, Salty water, Sugary water) and measured how tall the plant is on day 14 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 liquid the same, so only what the bean plants are watered with 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: Plain tap water and Sugary water 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: water with three amounts of salt, such as a quarter, a half and one teaspoon in 2 cups, and graph the height against the amount.