Science : Botany - Stem

We finally found the time to do Science in the third week of January.

The boys learned about woody versus herbaceous stems, xylem, phloem, cambium, auxin, phototropism etc. Since there were quite a number of new terms being introduced, I asked them to make their own 3-part vocabulary cards for these new terms. These cards were then stored in an envelope (the black envelope in the picture below) that is attached to the rest of their lapbook pages for this chapter. D and B were always very eager to match these cards whenever we started our Science session for this chapter. (For some strange reasons, I could not get the picture in the right orientation!)


We also learned about phototropism and the role of auxin from our Botany book. Here is our lapbook page on phototropism:


The sun in this page can be moved while the retractable straw "stem" follows it because it is stapled on the transparency sheet below. They all rotate on eyelets. I had purchased a set of eyelet setters from a scrapbooking supply store but had no idea how to use them. I learned how to set the eyelets by watching this videoclip. I used the eyelets to hole two pieces of paper together. It acts as the axis in which I can rotate the papers. We were VERY satisfied with this page we created!!! My hope is of course that the boys can remember the role of auxin in phototropism.

I must admit that creating our own lapbook pages is taking up more time than I would like. I am looking forward to completing Botany soon (was suppose to be finished by 2008 :-b) so we can start on either Astronomy or Zoology 1. There are free lapbook pages created by other homeschooling mums for these other books so I am hoping our study can move a little faster then...

We performed the suggested activity in our Botany book.



After about 3 hours, the leaves of the celery stick in the orange water was more orange in colour. The most obvious were the orange tips (which isn't in focus in this picture).



This picture shows the cross section of the celery sticks clearly showing the xylem (stained orange) in the celery stick on the right. The one on the left is the control.



Visit Rumphius Science Webpage to learn more about how we approach Science in our homeschool.