The Fairy-Land of Science · Lecture VII, part 1 · Part 7: Lecture VII: The life of a primrose
19. Inside a seed, and plants made of cells
Goal: Your child can find the baby plant and seed-leaves inside a soaked seed, and can say that plants are built of tiny bags called cells.
You'll need
- A few large dried beans (lima beans are best), soaked overnight in water (Buckley used soaked almonds)
- A piece of orange
- A magnifying glass
- A clear jar, a paper towel and two or three more soaked beans for sprouting
- Science notebook and pencils
What's in the book
Pages 150 to 155. A spring wood full of primroses; Tennyson's "Flower in the crannied wall"; a plant is born, feeds, sleeps and dies like an animal; inside an almond seed is a tiny plant between two seed-leaves; a piece of orange shows that plants are made of cells; and cells grow by splitting in two.
The lesson, step by step
Hook question
Hold up a dry bean.
SayIs this alive? How could you tell?
Let your child think. Buckley says a seed lies "like a person in a trance," waiting for warmth and water.
Read together
Read pages 151 and 152, including the footnote about what to bring.
For a plant is born, breathes, sleeps, feeds, and digests just as truly as an animal does, though in a different way.
Try it: find the baby plant
Peel the skin off a soaked bean and gently open it like a book. Look with the magnifying glass at one end: a tiny plant, with a little root and two tiny leaves.
This little lump (a b, Fig. 37) is a young plant, and the two halves of the almond are the seed-leaves which hold the plantlet, and feed it till it can feed itself.
Safety: if anyone has a nut allergy, use beans, not almonds.
Try it: plants are made of cells
Read page 154.
If you take the skin off a piece of orange, you will see inside a number of long-shaped transparent bags, full of juice.
These we call cells
Peel the thin skin from an orange segment and look at the juice bags with the magnifying glass. Every plant and animal is built of cells, most of them too small to see without a microscope.
How a plant grows
Read or tell page 155. Each cell fills up with food and then splits into two. Two become four, four become eight, and so the plant grows bigger.
Start a bean jar: wet a paper towel, line the jar with it, and tuck two soaked beans between the towel and the glass. Keep the towel damp. Watch for the root, then the shoot, over the coming week.
Tell it back and check
Your child tells back what is inside a seed. Then ask:
1. What are the two thick halves of the bean for?
2. What are the juice bags in an orange called?
3. How does a plant grow bigger?
What we know now
Buckley calls the living stuff in cells "protoplasm." Today we know that every cell also holds DNA, a set of instructions for building the whole plant or animal.
Afterwards
Notice it this week: check the bean jar every day and draw what you see. Which comes out first, the root or the shoot?
Tip
Soak the beans overnight in plenty of water. Big lima or broad beans split most easily and show the baby plant clearly.
Answers to the book's problems
1. They are the seed-leaves, holding the food that feeds the baby plant until it can feed itself. 2. Cells. 3. Its cells fill up with food and split in two, again and again.
Worked out for this site from the scan. If a number in your copy differs, trust the book.