Design Brief Grades K-2 Life Processes: Plants

Children’s Engineering Educators, LLC (gw) 2006 4/17/06

Planting a Rainbow We’ve been reading books and finding out all about plants and what they need to live. Some of the books we read were nonfiction. Some of the books were storybooks. Now we want to plant our own garden, but we don’t have space for a real garden. Design Challenge Design and build flowers for a garden plot that we will “plant” in our classroom. Remember that the garden should be a rainbow of colors and have flowers of all sizes and shapes. Criteria Each plant must have:

a stem leaves petals seeds roots.

Each plant must: be freestanding (able to stand up by itself) be shorter than a stack of 12 one inch cubes be taller than a stack of 4 one inch cubes.

Materials What can you use?

• construction paper • tag board or card stock • pipe cleaners • glue • yarn • 12 inches of tape (clear would be best)

Tools You may use these things to help you build. They may not be become part of your solution.

• scissors • hole punch • ruler • one inch cubes • markers • crayons

~ You do not need to use all of the materials and tools. ~

Design Brief Grades K-2 Life Processes: Plants

Children’s Engineering Educators, LLC (gw) 2006 4/17/06

Teacher Notes: Book Connections:

Planting a Rainbow, by Lois Ehlert From Seed to Plant, by Gail Gibbons The Tiny Seed, by Eric Carle Growing Vegetable Soup, by Lois Ehlert Jack’s Garden, by Henry Cole Pumpkin Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington How Groundhog’s Garden Grew, by Lynne Cherry

Hints about Materials: FYI - Paper tubes and other stiff objects such as Styrofoam were not put on the materials list. They seemed too obvious for using as stems, removing the problem solving involved with having the plants freestanding. Remember that you may change out the materials to fit the needs of your students. You might have tissue paper or crepe paper in your scrape box and want to include those. There is no reason why you can’t present the background and the challenge to your students without the list of materials. Placing the materials that each group may use in different paper bags would be a great way to organize for this activity. All bags don’t have to have exactly the same materials. (For example, some might have string and some might have yarn.) Just make sure that each bag has a wide variety of materials inside. Have fun! -ginger