Team Foundation News

Our Sustainable World

During this term’s inquiry unit, we have been learning about ways that we can sustain our environment. Part of sustaining our environment is learning what plants need to grow. One of our Essential Questions for this unit is, ‘What are the basic needs of living things?’ In order to answer this question, we further investigated what plants need to grow and survive. We discussed the plant life cycle and learnt about the stages of plant life including seed germination, seedling formation and growth and development of the seed. This investigation led us to planting broad bean seeds in the classroom.

Each student had the opportunity to plant a broad bean seed, covered in soil in a clear zip lock bag so we could easily observe the growth of the bean. As a group, we chose a broad bean seed to plant, added water and mixed the water and soil together to ensure the broad bean seed was ready to grow. Broad beans need access to sunlight so we decided to position our seeds along the FKJ classroom window ledge.

Each week, we observed the growth of the broad bean seed and discussed the results. We described and drew what we could see and measured the length of the broad bean using Unifix Blocks. As a reflection, we compared our observations and ask questions around the differences in the growth of the broad beans. This broad bean investigation aligns with our Developmental Play focus on gardening that we have been involved in this term.

We will continue exploring the concept of Sustainability and what this looks like for our students. Modelling sustainable practices at school such as recycling, planting, saving water, is such an important process for sustaining our environment and caring for our world and its future.