We’ve been talking a lot about leaves, trees, and plants, with interest being spurred on naturally what with all the fall going on lately. ;)
So, to add to our talks about how plants need water and how they obtain it and circulate it throughout the plant, we did a fun, quick, and fairly painless little experiment with celery.
If you want to do this, you will need a stalk of celery with leaves on it, a knife, a glass, a sunny window, water, and red food coloring.
Make a fresh cut on the celery stalk and put it in a glass of water. Add a few drops of red food coloring and stir it up with the celery.
Set your celery experiment in front of a sunny window (not sure this is necessary, but we did it this way) for a few hours or overnight if your child is more patient than mine.
Take the celery out of the water when you see the leaves have little red spots on them like this:M checked on it to see if it was “ready” or not several times throughout the day.
Then we sliced off a piece of the stem and took a look:You can see the “tubes” in the stalk of celery worked like straws and sucked the water up and into the leaves.
We worked with our leaf nomenclature cards on the same day, and learned that the little tubes in the leaves are called veins.
For more science fun, check out Science Sunday!
Have a beautiful day! :)
What a fun experiment for fall and being able to discuss how trees work and all :-)
ReplyDeleteI always love seeing the tubes after it's sucked up the liquid.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I'm not sure I would have been able to explain how that works before. This is a great way to really show the kids how it works.
ReplyDeleteIt's been a long time since we've done this one - I wonder if the kids still remember...
ReplyDelete