Living Root Garden School • Plants & How They Grow • Name: ______________________
🔍 The Case
The case of the tiny time machine — a dry bean sat in the kitchen for months, then built a whole plant. What is packed inside?
Every true seed has the same four parts. The seed coat is the jacket — a tough outer shell that keeps water out until the right moment. The embryo is the baby plant, with its parts already assigned: the radicle, the root that always comes out first, and the plumule, the tiny folded-up shoot.
The baby plant cannot photosynthesize yet, so it brings a packed lunch. In corn, wheat, and rice the food sits in a separate tissue called the endosperm; in beans, peas, and peanuts the food is stored inside the cotyledons, the seed leaves, which double as the pantry.
The fourth part is the clock: dormancy, a waiting state where the seed is alive but barely, its metabolism idling at almost zero. In 2005, scientists germinated a 2,000-year-old date palm seed — it waited two thousand years and then grew.
Seeds travel because plants cannot walk their babies anywhere. Dandelion seeds ride parachutes of fluff called pappus; maple seeds are samaras, twin-bladed helicopters that spin as they fall; burdock burrs are covered in tiny hooks that grab animal fur — burrs inspired the invention of Velcro; and jewelweed pods explode at the slightest touch, flinging seeds several feet.
Ask: Which seed in your collection will sprout first if you plant them all, and how would it travel if it could choose? Write your guess before you sort.
Try: Collect seeds from the kitchen and the yard, sort them by size and by how they travel — wind, animal, popping open, or another way — and label each envelope with the seed's name and its travel trick.
Stretch (Teens & Growers ready for more): Run a germination trial: the same seed, two conditions, ten seeds each — for example, damp paper towel in light versus in the dark. Compare the percentages that sprout.
Tell: Fill in the log below — date, what you sorted, what surprised you — then finish this sentence in words or a labeled drawing: “The seed traveled by ___ because ___.”
Date
What I saw
What surprised me
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
🛠️ Build It
Draw one seed's journey in three little scenes — traveling by wind, by animal, and by popping open.
🗣️ Be the Teacher
Show someone your seed envelopes and explain why a seed is a lunchbox, a baby, and a time machine — in your own words, no reading off the packet.
🏅 I can…
☐ I can name the four parts inside a seed.
Portfolio check
☐ Guide read
☐ Case solved
☐ Ask, Try, Tell done
☐ Build It filed: Labeled seed envelopes + planting log
☐ Taught someone
☐ Badge earned: I can name the four parts inside a seed.
Living Root Garden School • livingrootgarden.com/homeschool/ • Free — print as many copies as you like. File this sheet with your portfolio log. Sprouts do the Read, the Case, and Build It; Growers try the Ask, Try, Tell stretch when ready; Teens do the whole packet — including teaching it back.