We Have Sprouts!

After grinding our grain into flour last week, we put aside a bowl of the wheat berries and mixed in a little water to see what would happen. This week we observed that something was growing in the grain! Much of the grain has white and green stems sprouting out of it, and each day this week the sprouts coming out of the grain grew longer and greener. We identified that each little grain has roots and a stem coming out of the seed. Each of these little grains is a tiny plant! This is a pretty exciting experiment! We wonder what these tiny plants will grow into.

What will the sprouts turn into?

·         “Flowers” – Elli R.

·         “Trees” – Ellie S.

·         “Plants. Or a rainbow star.” –Willa

·         “A pea. Or a unicorn flower.” – Laila

·         “Flowers” –Kate

·         “Flowers or rainbows” – Gray

·         “Flowers” –Woods

·         “Flowers” –Smith

·         “Beans. Or red flowers.” – Marleigh

·         “Big blue flowers” –Murphy

·         “Corn” – Brooks L.

·         “Trees, because the seeds look like Leo’s acorns. Or pink and tall flowers.” – Dylan

·         “Rocks. I’ve seen rocks with green on them. Or sunflowers.” –Owen

·         “Flowers.” –Ava

·         “A bean.” – Brooks H.

·         “Stars.” – Rowan

·         “Big trees” –Sawyer

·         “A rainbow” –Carly

·         “Purple flowers” –Lily

·         “Maybe a flower? I don’t know yet.” –Henry

·         “A rainbow flower, like in a princess commercial.” –Bennett

·         “Tall green flower.” –Leo

·         “Yellow flower.” –Abigail

·         “A blueberry tree.” –Cash 

Emily, our Farm and Garden teacher, came in on Tuesday and taught us how to make one of our favorite ingredients – butter!  We filled jars with cream and shook, shook, and shook the jars all morning long until the cream turned into butter.  Then, we used cheese cloth to strain out the butter from the butter milk. Ta-da! Our beautiful homemade butter will be used by other classes to make dishes for our Harvest Party, and to spread on our delicious homemade bread.

This week, we took walks around campus and down the street.   We observed signs of fall and collected fall leaves.  We found leaves that were yellow, red, brown, lime green with spots, and orange. We put these in our plant press to dry them flat.  It was fun to squeeze the press tightly.  We wonder how flat the plants will get.  In about a week, we will use the leaves in our art projects or to study in the science center.  

On Wednesday we celebrated Harvest Party and Grandparents Day!  We were pleased to see that other friends liked the bread we spent so much time making last week.  Some of us even tried new foods like quiche, gnocchi, cabbage salad, roasted potatoes and beets, and carrot cake.  We also made apple cider using the press and tossing in apples.  It was really fun to use our big muscles to turn the crank.

Our sprout experiment has gotten a little more complicated.  Some mold grew in the dish over the weekend!  We are a little worried that the mold is taking up the space the sprouts need to grow.  We will start over with a new system to grow the sprouts.

Here are some of our thoughts on what happened to the sprouts:

It grew and some fell down. The white stuff is snow or ice. Will it make those grow? – Willa

Some grew. There’ some white. The mold is making the plants die. The seeds are bended down in the mold. – Dylan

There is fuzzy white stuff. It is really fuzzy in there. Some seeds are black and some are gray.– Carly

I see white ice. Mold is the white stuff. It might die –Owen

It grew taller. – Brooks H. 

So fuzzy. –Ava

There is snow like the mountains. – Gray

Seeds, and there is grass. – Ellie  

Little white stuff, seeds, grass. – Kate

The grass is growing. – Elli

Seeds are sprouting into little pieces of grass and it might grow into a big tree. – Sawyer

A rainbow. – Connor

Rainbows? – Rowan

Fuzz, white fuzz. –Lily

I see seeds. –Leo

I think it will turn into clouds. – Henry

I see a seed stuck to the wall. White stuff and black stuff. – Bennett 

This week, we put on our “seed goggles” and went on a seed hunt in the garden with our Farm and Garden teacher Emily to find a variety of seeds to dry over the winter and plant in the spring. We found garlic, poppy, bean, potato, dill, coriander, and lupine. Did you know that some seeds, like beans in the pod, make a sound when you shake them?  It sounds like a rattle, or like “a musical instrument” (Murphy).  Our favorite seeds were “purple striped beans” (Dylan), “black beans” (Ava), “white beans” (Brooks H), “striped seeds” (Kate), “purple beans” (Elli), “pink beans” (Carly), “beans striped like a zebra” (Owen),  and “the old egg, no…I mean the old rotted red potato” (Smith).  We also started sorting all the seeds we have collected into jars.  There are many ways to sort objects, such as: by size, color, shape, or type.  We decided to sort the seeds by color.  This special job will take us a few days to finish.  We also made some estimates for how many seeds we think we will have at the end: 40 black beans (Owen); 16 sunflower seeds (Dylan); 5 black beans with spots (Rowan).  We will wait and see how close our guesses are when we count the seeds next week.