Strawberries: Ripe for Inquiry

Do your "schoolgrown" strawberries taste good? Ours do!

Is that a fact or a hypothesis?  
Sounds like the time “is ripe” to do some inquiry and project-based science and art.

Strawberries are a wonderful and delicious teaching tool that cycles with the school year here in Virginia as you can observe them grow over the winter, flower, produce berries and harvest to eat in May and early June.

Strawberries - May 2015, Jamestown Elementary School

May is Strawberry Month. If you missed it, put it on the calendar for next year and plan ahead to grow some and use strawberries to teach a lesson or two as they grow...

A few stats from the industry- as growing Strawberries is a billion-dollar business...

Where to grow strawberries?

Grow some strawberries in the ground - with or without netting

Here's some grown in the shade at Arlington Traditional School

Here’s plants in a sunny spot at Jamestown Elementary School.

Here are some container grown in EarthBoxes - with red plastic mulch with the Homeschool Club of Arlington.

The red plastic mulch speeds up the ripening compared to black mulch or straw. Do an experiment comparing mulches and see if you agree? And check your results with research from Penn State.

Here’s some commercially field grown strawberries with black mulch and irrigation system at Mackintosh Fruit Farms.

Here’s scientists growing strawberries in glasshouses and testing different cultivars in a gutter "sock" hydroponics system at Lynchburg Grows.

Strawberry Towers
Photo from DC School Garden Bike Tour Cultivate the City via Facebook

Or grow strawberries and pineberries in tower gardens or garden towers - and grow a business as at JO Wilson, DC Public schools.

Talking of art and strawberries

Notice the patterns of the seeds on the outside and the beauty of the cross-section

Notice the color and pattern

Make a clay brooch. here’s mine from pre-Sculpy days!

Or choose a technique to make signs for the school strawberry patch. Here above is a 5-year old's painting with acrylic on board, that I then sealed with acrylic spray sealer. The students nailed their own boards to the stakes for our kitchen garden signs. The stakes untreated last about a year, the painting longer.

Here are a couple of signs I made for school and community gardens. I designed the artwork on powerpoint or google presentation and laser printed onto Xerox Never Tear polyester paper and put into metal signholders. The ink lasts a couple of years or so.

What’s not a strawberry? The false strawberry!

Got those prolific little strawberries that taste dry and dusty in your home or school yard? Those plants with the yellow flowers are “false strawberries”.

False strawberry Duchesnia indica, has yellow flowers

Wild strawberries, and strawberries cultivated for fruit have white flowers.

Wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana has white flowers

Cultural context

Wild strawberries are native to Virginia. 

• Read the Cherokee Indian story about the First Strawberry.

Ideas for experiments

• Do a KWL diagram of what students already know before the project, want to learn, and have learned after your project.
• Does mulching with red mulch, black mulch or straw help increase yield?
• Test for shade and sun production?
• How do different soil conditions affect our harvest?
• Does a strawberry grow better in clay, silt or sandy soil?
• What other factors are affecting results?
• Do fertilizers (nutrients for the plant) affect production?
• Grow strawberries indoors and measure runners (see NSTA article)
• Extract Strawberry DNA (see resource links below)
• For elementary students read The Strawberry by Jennifer Coldrey and George Bernard

Field Trip

Take the students to a berry or fruit farm near you to see technology and agri-business in action.

• How is strawberry production affected by weather in your area? 
• Are the farmers growing strawberries indoors or out? 
• What’s the market? Who are they growing strawberries for? 
• How much do they sell the strawberries for?  How much does it cost to produce each strawberry?

I was talking to some scientists last year who were designing a strawberry de-hulling machine and wanted to pilot it. They showed me pictures of the machine and how it was designed to hull strawberries - and was much safer than tools currently often used by workers in the fields for example in Florida.  I put the scientist team in contact with some of our local food distributors to set up a real world piloting experiment for the machine.  I wonder if they are piloting it now?

How Food Grows has some resources, including a time-lapse video of strawberries growing. I am also waiting for the How Does It Grow folks to produce film on strawberry production, if they do I will post it.  In the meantime, here below are some additional "strawberry-themed" resources.

Strawberry Resources

LINK to how to make signs using QR Codes and Xerox Never Tear paper technique

• Strawberry Lifecycle Sign for schoolyard by Mary Van Dyke
• Strawberry sign by Mary Van Dyke linked to QR Codes of stories for younger audience

Green STEM Learning Blog links:

• Strawberry Fields Forever ...Plans, Planting, Protection
• Strawberry Fields Forever... Mulch, Observe, Journal
• Strawberry Fields Forever...Strawberry Science

Books
The First Strawberry retold by Joseph Bruchac, illustrated by Anna Vojtech
The Strawberry by Jennifer Coldrey and George Bernard

Films
How Strawberry Grows - timelapse

NGSS and VA SOL Standards Activities and Correlation Examples

Garden-based learning at Elementary School:

It’s just the Berries - NSTA Science and Children journal p 58.

http://digital.nsta.org/publication/?i=&p=&l=1&m=13899&ver=&pp=

NGSS 3rd Grade - Inheritance and Variation of Traits

http://www.nextgenscience.org/3ivt-inheritance-variation-traits-life-cycles-traits

VA SOL 3rd Grade Science - Plant Lifecycles

Middle Schoolers approx 7th Grade - Genetics

Extracting DNA from Strawberry

see http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/strawberry-dna

or more detailed http://www.seplessons.org/node/217

High Schoolers VA SOL Sample Lesson Life Sciences

Extracting DNA from Strawberry

http://www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/science/2010/lesson_plans/life_sci/ecosystems/sess_LifeSci-12ae.pdf