Starting "The Sciences": 7 Stages of Living and Parts of a Plant

Today, we started going through the Keystage 2 - Science book. Thanks so much Fran xxx

Its really interesting.

We did a quick look at the whole book to get an idea of what will be coming up. Then started at the beginning.

The 7 stages of living (animals and plants)

This is easy to remember, using a mnemonic of "Mrs Nerg".

Mrs Nerg stands for the first letter of each of the life processes that one needs to remember.

M - Movement (Plant roots grow down, animals move their whole bodies, )

R - Reproduce (Offspring in animals /seeds in plants)
S - Sensitive (Reacting to changes i.e. plants and light, dogs and food)
N - Nutrition (Food provides energy to grow).

Plants make their own food using the suns light

Animals eat plants and other animals
E - Excrete (get rid of waste gases, liquids and solids)
R - Respire (Breath - both plants and animals need gases to stay alive e.g. oxygen)
G - Grow (Seedlings grow into bigger plants and animal's offspring grow into adults).

The next page was about living/dead/never lived and cells and particles. The info on cells was easy as I looked at that yesterday a bit with my microscope ;) The questions page was easy peasy!

The next page was Section 2 - Plants.

There are 4 main parts to a plant:

1. Flowers - (reproduction)

Colour, Smell to attract insects.

Make pollen (male) to join with 'eggs' (female).

Part of flower dies and remainder becomes the new fruit/seeds.

2. Leaves - (Nutrition/food)

Green chlorophyll - photosynthesis (From the light)

3. Stem - (Support)

Hold, move the plant towards the light

4. Roots - (Anchor the plant)

Root hairs suck water and minerals from the soil (Nutrition)

I drew a diagram of a plant to help memorise all the parts.

Then we had a look at different flowers I picked in our garden and I used my new safety knife to slice them vertically for cross-section studies.

I also did a flower part 'story' on purplemash.com

Links

For parts of the plant and flower: http://www.purplemash.com/flowerparts/ ( you can build your own group of photos and descriptions to help you remember the parts of flowers).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/science/ - there is a cool game on here that you have to work out how to get your questions by clicking of things in the picture, in the right order and then answering the questions on english, maths, science etc. Its fun with cute drawings.

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Its very frustrating that we did not do this sort of work at school during the past 2 years! I am so pleased I am now home schooling.

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Yesterday my little sister came home from school and told us that they did not do any school work on the first day back at school and I felt happy that I had learned a lot at home school! Swimming as part of PE at school has also been stopped due to budget cuts.

Luckily our family went swimming last night as part of our gym membership and we had a bit of fun as well as practicing our swimming. As we do watersports like sailing and kayaking its really important that we can swim a distance if we need to.

My little sister was really good and started swimming backstroke from watching us. She used a board to swim to the deep-end and back a couple of times which is good for her stamina. Not bad for her age! So at least we get swimming even though other kids don't. Quite a few kids go to the fun sessions at the pool outside of school but they dont practice their style or stamina, just fool about on pool toys which is fun but does not help if you are out sailing or kayaking and need to swim to shore !