Today is rung 4 of 6 on this topic
Life cycles, seeds and how plants spread
Can do: Describes a life cycle in order and explains how seeds travel away from the parent plant.
Why it matters
It's the first system a child understands as a repeating cycle rather than a straight line, and seed dispersal is a beautiful, testable bit of design.
What it looks like when it's wobbly
Knows the stages but not the order, and assumes seeds simply fall and grow where they land.
⏱️ Two-minute check
"Put the butterfly's life in order. Why would a plant want its seeds to travel?"
Solid looks like: Egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly — and some notion of competition for light or water.
The full activity for this topic · 20 minutes
Seed Hunt and Sort
- 1Cut open three fruits and find the seeds. Count them.
- 2Outside, collect seeds: sycamore spinners, dandelion clocks, sticky burrs.
- 3Sort by how they travel: wind, animals, water, exploding.
- 4Drop a spinner from a height and time it. Design a better one from paper.
- 5Plant a few of the kitchen seeds and see what actually grows.
If it's too hard
Just find seeds in three fruits and count them.
If it's too easy
Explain why a plant that drops all its seeds underneath itself does badly.
Say this
"How does this seed get away from its parent? Look at its shape — the shape is the answer."