Budding Botanists explore plants!

This week students learned about the parts of plants and learned by how scientists classify plants based on their modes of reproduction by seeds or spores, by the presence of water and sugar carrying vascular systems, and by flower  & fruit development. Students discussed differences between mosses  (short, non-vascular plants), ferns (seedless vascular plants), gymnosperms (example, conifers) and angiosperms (flowering plants).  They also noted the process by which plants created their own food (photosynthesis) and learned what ingredients were needed to generate sugar by plants.  We also discussed the process of pollination and the generation of seeds in flowering plants. In this discussion, students learned that different pollinators were attracted to different types of flowers.  Finally, we ended our class with a fun flower dissection.  During the dissection, students worked on identifying and determining the function of the specialized structures of the flower.