Scientific Enquiry - Seeds and Wind Dispersal

Today in year 5 was our scientific enquiry day. The children were firstly given fruit and asked to locate the seeds inside. They were then given the following question:
Is it better for plants with wind dispersed seeds to grow tall or short?

In order to answer this question the children worked in groups and had to use their thinking and communication skills to produce a method for the experiment. They then used their Numeracy skills to measure heights and distances.

They chose their resources carefully:
Equipment:
Sunflower Seeds
Large sheets of A1 sized paper
Coloured pens
A meter rule
(Stacey's write up exported from word)

Method:

Hold a meter rule upright in the middle of the paper.

Hold 20 seeds at to the 25cm mark on the meter rule.

Tip the seeds to float down to the paper

Using a coloured Pencil, draw around the area covered with seeds.

Sweep up the loose seeds and put them back in the pot.

Repeat the experiment but with the seeds emptied at 50cm , 75cm and then 100cm.

Make sure you draw around the seeds with different coloured pencils each time

(Stacey's method)

We used our ICT skills from our spreadsheet lessons this term to create a spreadsheet of the classes results. Then, we went to the ICT suite(J6, J5 tomorrow) to write the results up individually.

Tomorrow we will post the write up and explain our results.