Growing Sprouts - The neXt Lesson Collaboration with Gr. 12 Students ELP

Growing Sprouts With our Grade 12 Friends

As part of a school board wide intiative to improve lesson planning, our class is part of a 21C project called The neXt Lesson. This initiative aims to improve student learning by pairing with another classroom to:

1. Participate in a project which involves "knowledge construction"    NOT "knowledge reproduction".

2. Solve a "real life" problem.

At a teacher in-service, I had the opportunity to meet a Gr. 12 Nutrition teacher at St. John Paul II named Ms. Mieta. As part of our collaboration, we decided to grow sprouts with the students in my FDK class. Ms. Mieta's class was responsible for beginning the project for us and they set up the sprouting jars.  They also posted videos on "How to Sprout" on YouTube. We came up with some possible inquiry questions around sprouting:

Can we sprout our own food? 

Can we grow other food to eat? 

Can we grow food indoors?

We came up with some possible If/Then statements:

If we grow sprouts in a jar, then we can eat them.
If we grow sprouts, then we can use non-standard units to measure their growth.

This project meets Full-Day Kindergarten Expectations on many levels: (Science/Math/Language:

Math: Measure and compare length, using non-standard units (through measuring how much our sprouts/plants grow)

Science: Demonstrate an understanding of the natural world and the need to care and respect our environment; conduct simple investigations using simple inquiry skills; living and non-living things; make predictions and explorations.

Language: Beginning writing and Oral Language (communicating by asking questions).

It also deals with the real-world problem of growing food for consumption and eating healthy.

As a classroom, we watched Ms. Mieta's class describe how to set up the sprouts and how to care for them when we got them. I also did a knowledge building session on what the children thought about what they watched. 

Part I and II Videos are posted here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuUjGoSZSok

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDFMrWOKvbY

When the sprouts were started, Ms. Mieta's Gr. 12's came to visit our classroom to give us the sprouting jars and various materials that we needed.

The Gr. 12 students handed out jars to each student.

Ms. Mieta and her students.

Our sprouts have been watered and set up to grow! 

Our FDK students were responsible for watering the sprouts twice a day and draining the water. We placed the jars on a dish rack sideways for drainage. The students had the opportunity to observe and draw the sprouts as they grew and changed. 

Our Learning Goals were:

1. To measure their sprouts using the snap cubes and tell how many.
2. Show "how many" by colouring the squares on the snap cube paper.
3. Compare their own growth to a friend's to show which has more.

The students watered the sprouts twice a day.

The students observed and tracked the growth of the sprouts.

They used snap-cubes to measure how much they had grown.

They compared their measurements and said which has more. "7 cubes is more than 6!"

"These sprouts have filled the jar to 6 cubes!"

The sprouts grew very large!

They observed the plants over 5 days.

We took some out to have a closer look at plant parts.

On Friday, we took them out of the jar, we tasted them and then we sent them home!

In the next month, we will take our sprouting to the next level.  Ms. Mieta and Mr. Eddy's classes (Gr. 12) will be teaching us about soil and growing indoor vegetables. We have been in touch with Loblaw Foods to see if we can grow some vegetables to take to Loblaws to make a dish to eat.