Science: Seed Dispersal

This week’s theme was seeds. We started with “Flip, Flop, Fly: seeds on the move” by Joann Early Macken.  I am fairly certain these little scientists knew everything I wanted to share with them 🙂 We decided to experiment with different ways seeds disperse. We started with a glove and burs and learned that the little “teeth” help burs to travel very far in animal fur or feathers. Then we experimented with gravity and tried dropping a large fruit (a weighted ball) and small fruit (marble) to see how far it was able to travel. The highlight was probably filling balloons up with bird seed and seeing how far it would fly from the balloon when it popped. We experimented with a few different hypotheses on which method would get the seeds to fly the furthest. We concluded that the fuller the balloon, the farther the seeds flew, but height did not seem to change things as we predicted it would. At the very end, we explored how animals can eat seeds and carry them away from the plant. Each kid picked an animal and then had to move like that animal. Our conclusion here was fast animals and flying animals can carry seeds pretty far, pretty quickly.