February 2025
by Josh
We have been busy with beans lately, both in the classroom and in the garden this week.
The pupils have been putting their thinking caps on and investigating what conditions beans need to germinate. We started by brainstorming the things we thought they might need and then devised an experiment to test our hypothesis. It’s important to approach investigations like this with a scientific mindset, so we made sure to think really critically about how we could make our tests fair by setting up a control and by only changing one condition at a time for each of our test trials:
- Soil
- Water
- Light
- Heat
- Control
There were some intriguing results! The pupils discovered, that despite their expectations, beans don’t need soil or light to germinate, however the lack of these things did affect the growth of the plants in weird and wonderful ways.
With our new knowledge we set out to the garden. The beans we planted are climbers, so we needed to make a structure to support their growth. The kids did an amazing job of working as a team to hold the canes, tie them together and position them in the beds.
Now we wait to see the first bean sprouts emerge, which will be proof that we have given them all of the correct conditions for germination to occur.