🌱 Plants and the light: the whole packet

🌱 Plants and the light · 1st–5th grade · 12 days of testing · free · 15 minutes a sitting

My days, if the fair is 16 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 where the light comes from, then how far the top of the plant leans from straight up 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
• 🥤 Paper cups with a hole poked in the bottom: 9
• 🪴 Potting soil
• 🚰 Water from the tap
• 📦 A shoebox: a shoebox with a lid
• ✂️ Kid scissors
• 📏 A ruler

Be safe: 👶 Small parts · 🧼 Wash your hands after

1. Plant one bean in each of nine cups of soil, a finger deep, and water them.
2. Water them a little each day until they're about 5 cm tall. That takes about five days.
3. Grown-up: A grown-up cuts a coin-sized hole in one end of the shoebox.
4. Put three cups on a sunny windowsill and never turn them.
5. Put three more beside them, and turn each one halfway round every day.
6. Put the last three in the box with the hole toward the window, and close the lid.
7. Each day, hold a ruler straight up beside each stem and measure how far the top leans.
8. After seven days, find the middle lean for each spot and draw a bar graph.
9. Wash your hands after touching the soil.

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

I changed: Where it grows   I measured: how far the top of the plant leans from straight up (cm)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: where it grows 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: cover the box's hole with red, blue or green see-through plastic, and find which colour the plants bend toward most.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: do plants bend toward the window?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing where the light comes from would change how far the top of the plant leans from straight up, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed where the light comes from (Windowsill, never turned, Windowsill, turned every day, Box with a hole on one side) and measured how far the top of the plant leans from straight up in cm.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same kind of bean, planted the same day and the same water each day the same, so only where the light comes from 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: Windowsill, never turned and Box with a hole on one side 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: cover the box's hole with red, blue or green see-through plastic, and find which colour the plants bend toward most.