🥬 Celery, leaves and coloured water: the whole packet

🥬 Celery, leaves and coloured water · 3rd–8th grade · 1 day of testing · about $2 · 40 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 many leaves are left on the stalk, then how far up the stalk the colour climbs in four hours 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

• 🥬 A bunch of celery: 9 stalks about the same size
• 🌈 Food colouring: blue or red, the darker the better
• 🚰 Water from the tap
• 🥛 Clear plastic cups, all the same size: 9
• 🥛 A measuring cup
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines
• 🔪 A sharp kitchen knife, for the grown-up
• ✂️ Kid scissors
• 📏 A ruler

Be safe: ✂️ Sharp · 🚫 Test food is not for eating · 🧽 A bit messy

1. Grown-up: A grown-up cuts the bottom 2 cm off nine celery stalks, so each has a fresh end.
2. Leave three stalks with all their leaves, snip half the leaves off three, and all off three.
3. Put a quarter cup of water and 10 drops of food colouring in each of nine clear cups.
4. Stand one stalk in each cup, cut end down, and label the cups.
5. Leave them in a warm, bright room for four hours.
6. Grown-up: A grown-up slices each stalk open from the bottom up, along its length.
7. Measure how far up the stalk the coloured lines reach.
8. The three stalks of each kind are your three trials: write each one in your table.
9. Find the mean for each and draw a bar graph.

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

I changed: Leaves   I measured: how far up the stalk the colour climbs in four hours (cm)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: leaves 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: stand one set in a sunny window and one in a dark cupboard, and graph light and dark side by side.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: do leaves help celery pull up coloured water?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing how many leaves are left on the stalk would change how far up the stalk the colour climbs in four hours, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed how many leaves are left on the stalk (All its leaves, Half its leaves, No leaves) and measured how far up the stalk the colour climbs in four hours in cm.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept stalks about the same size, from the same bunch and the same water and colour in each cup the same, so only how many leaves are left on the stalk 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: All its leaves and No leaves 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: stand one set in a sunny window and one in a dark cupboard, and graph light and dark side by side.