After taking off for President's Day yesterday, we are back to work and having tons of fun with science.   After a long, cold winter what is better than to get outside on our first warm day and do experiments with plants?  

As we continue our 2 or 3 week study of biology, a wonderful resource for a simplified view of plants and their life cycle is  Biology of Plants.  It's has a very comprehensive, but visual explanation that we needed.  We dug into lots of detail by learning the anatomy of a seed, a leaf, a plant and a flower thanks to EnchantedLearning.com.   We watched a lengthy video by a student on "Seeds and Plants" at Studio4Learning.  And last but not least, I have found a wonderful author who has quite a menagrie of simple experiments in his books.  The author's name is Robert W. Wood.  In the last photo, you can see the book of his that we used for biology but since then I found out through the library that he has a huge book that encompasses experiments for ALL science areas: geography, chemistry, meteorology, geology, animal biology, plant biology and engineering.  It is called The McGraw-Hill big book of science activities Fun and Easy experiments for Kids. 

Here Princess is placing a small piece of paper to the top of a leaf  to find the answer to why plants have leaves?  By covering up a small portion of the leaf, we'll find that the plant can't produce chlorophyll if the sun can't penetrate the leaf. 

Here you can see the small square of paper on our leaf on the right-hand side.  We left it outside in the sun for 3 days before our conclusion.

Here in her science journal it says "where the square was on the leaf, it was lighter which proves that sunlight couldn't penetrate and it was unable to make chlorophyll.  She then drew some leaves and their veins.

Thank you Lord for this fun opportunity!

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