Plants for Primary Pupils

Numeracy

In most of the booklets, there are opportunities for doing something with numbers. In Reproduction and life cycles 1: Parts of a flower, children learn to dissect a flower and count up the numbers of the different parts, looking for an underlying relationship between the numbers. In Living processes and what plants need to grow, children find out how fast roots grow and learn to work out a growth rate for their roots (seedlings grown in Petri dishes). They look at whether adding mineral salts affects the growth of radishes - try to find out the best way to measure ‘growth’ and can give their results in the novel form of a ‘radogram’ (really a modified bar chart.

Figure 15 - Recording colours of flowers

Figure 16 - The parts of a dissected flower

Figure 17 - A ‘radogram’

In Grouping and classification, children need to make quite accurate measurements when trying to describe leaves or the seeds they are sorting. The final booklet (Plants in their natural environment) promises to let children estimate the number of seeds produced by a plant (such as Rosebay willowherb) and wonder what happens to all the seeds that the plant produces. Can you make a guesstimate of the answer? . . . or will you wait for the final booklet and do it systematically with the children (and help them use their numeracy skills)?

Plants for Primary Pupils - Investigations