Las Plantas - Plants: First Grade Study Plants in Spanish and English

Today is pouring with rain. Ms Zamora and I have planned our lesson on the theme Las Plantas - Plants, for First Grade to be indoors or out.

I bring a basket of spring garden flowers and some leaves to school. The flowers are: Daffodils, Snowflakes, Bleeding Hearts, Hellebores, and Spirea blossoms.

I also bring some Heuchera leaves, and an Aquilegia (Red Columbine) plant in a pot complete with roots, leaves, and flower in bud.

Today's lesson on plants has three parts:

Plant Needs
First we talk about PLANT needs (we can do this exercise easily in Spanish or English).
I ask the students what plants need to live well - to thrive?
In the English version as the students respond I begin to write a vertical acrostic on the whiteboard in the order of their response.

P - Place
L - Light, sun, indoor light
A - Air i.e. CO2
N - Nutrients, Nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium
T - Thirsty i.e. water, H2O
S - Soil, earth, dirt or other material to anchor roots

In Spanish, you can spell PLANTAS

P - Plantada en un recipiente o jardin
L - Luz del sol o luz artificiel
A - Aire, Oxigeno y Dioxido de Carbono
N - Nutrientes, fosforo, potasio
T - Tienen sed, igual que todos los seres vivos
A - Agua es necesaria
S -  Suelo u otro material (arena, grava, aqua) para que crezcan sus raices

In either English or Spanish, this is a great formative assessment exercise adapted from Junior Master Gardeners (see resources below). In the three classes Ms Zamora and I facilitate today the First Graders do not know that plants need nutrients. So we discuss nutrients in more detail, mentioning plants need elements such as Nitrogen (N), Potassium (K) and Phosphorous (P), or their compounds from soil or fertilizer. Plants produce their own food, "sugars or carbohydrates" using the CO2 from the air, chlorophyll and with energy from the sun. We also discuss that sometimes plants can grow without soil.

Plant Parts
I take the Aquilegia, Red Columbine, plant out of the pot to look at the roots as well as the plant. We recap the parts of a plant in English and Spanish: roots/rais; leaves/hojas, bud, flower, stem etc.
Look at the leaf veins. The leaf veins of the Aquilegia plant are netted or branched, while the leaf veins of a daffodil or snowflake are parallel.
Count the petals of the flower too.

Observing the plants
I then introduce the third part of the lesson.  There are microscopes at each table, and magnifying glasses for each student. Each student has a flower and leaf to observe.

• Count the petals on your flower. How many petals are there?
• What kind of vein pattern is your leaf? Is it branched or parallel?
• What do you find interesting or special about your flower and leaf?

After 10 minutes observing the flowers and leaves at each table, students regroup into a circle and report out.

• Some Daffodil flowers have 5 petals, some 7 petals, but most Daffodil flowers have six petals, and six stamens and their leaves are parallel-veined. 
• Snowflake flowers also have six petals and six stamens, and parallel-veined leaves.  
• Aquilegia and Hellebore flowers both have five petals and five stamens and have netted/branched leaves. 
• Spirea had so many petals, that most students found there were too many to count, although one student carefully counted 18 petals, and another 20 petals. But the green calyx of the Spirea was a clearly a symmetry of five with five sepals, and the leaves were netted/branched.

• The Bleeding Heart flower is beautiful and difficult to put in a category for petal counting.  Maybe you could say it has two petals or perhaps four? Bleeding Heart's leaves are easily described as netted/branched.

In response to the extension question, "What do you find interesting or special about your flower and leaf?" many students talk about pollen and pollination. Where might seeds form in their flower? One student dissects the ovary and ovules and finds small seeds already forming there.

This 45-minute lesson provides a base for further discussion and seed sorting, that Daffodils, Snowflakes and other flowers with a symmetry of 3 and 6 and parallel-veined leaves are monocots, and that flowering plants with 5, 8 (or a multiple of five and eight) petals and netted/branched leaves are dicots.

Resources:
Plant Needs in English adapted from Junior Master Gardener Teacher Leader Guide, Level One, p. 11 and Plant Parts Diagram p 241
Plant Needs in Spanish adapted from Joven Jardinero Maestro Guia Para el Maestro/Lider, p. 12 and Plant Parts Diagram in Spanish, p 251