Teaching About Plant Families

For our second class at Mound's Park Academy we taught our 3rd and 4th graders a lesson on plant families. We covered the Carrot, Cabbage, Nightshade, Lily, Cucurbit and Legume families. These kids always surprise me with the random facts they know and the intelligent questions they ask. Here's what caught their attention the most and which things they wanted to know more about.
1. Onions making you cry was a big topic that most classes brought up when we discussed the onion family. With one of the 4th grade classes I took out my phone and looked up the name of the chemical that onions produce (syn-propanethial-S-oxide) and had them write it on the board. They all thought this was really fascinating.
2. Poisonous plant parts. When we brought up the fact that potato leaves are poisonous, they were very interested in knowing more about why that was.
3. Many of them take French as a class so when we brought up the Legume family, they realized how easy it would be to remember what was in that family because in french, legume means bean.
4. The information that tomatoes are actually fruits is always a good one to bring up. Some kids know that, some don't. 
5. This isn't particularly plant related, but having them pair up or work in threes seemed to be a very effective way to start discussion about their assigned plant family. They're a lot more comfortable making guesses about answers in that small setting than with the whole class.

On a separate note, their microgreens are growing nicely. We ran into a small snafu with the grow light cart that they have where the lights weren't actually coming on, but we figured that it'll be a good teaching tool to show kids what happens to plants when they don't get enough light. Hopefully we were able to fix it and the microgreens will green up more in the next week.
Next week, we'll be eating our microgreens and talking a little bit about nutrition. I have a feeling, however, that eating will take up most of our half hour class time with the kids and the nutrition bit will be something we have to slide in there as much as we can.