Reflections on the Collaborative Plant Project with

I had a really fun time with the Plant Experiment project we did with Kelly's class. My students learned a lot about plants from each other but also from Kelly's class. Her students commented on our VoiceThread and our Students commented on theirs. Kelly's students reflected very nicely and made some comparisons between our projects and theirs. This turned out to be several lessons which extended the learning opportunities from the anticipation phase through the reflection phase.
One thing I liked about VoiceThread was the ease of recording comments and deleting comments if they made a mistake. This lesson would have been better if we had done it a little earlier because it would have given more time to reflect more deeply and to do some experiments from the seed stage rather than starting with potted plants.
Kelly set up her VoiceThread in a more student and inquiry-friendly format with each student group posting on a separate VT. What made it fun was pausing the VT after her students explain their experiment and having my students record predictions about what would happen then resuming the video to check the results.
Overall a great lesson for Science Standard 1 (process of scientific inquiry) and appropriate for this age of student.

Kemp / Alsup First Grade Collaborative Plant Project

Here is the Voicethread for the Kemp / Alsup collaborative plant experiment. We look forward to sharing comments with Kelly's class. Each group created a question they wanted to pursue as well as a hypothesis. Then they designed their experiment and logged the results.

First grade collaborative plant project

First grade collaborative plant project.
Kelly Berry, Jon Fisher
Students will develop a testable research question and design an experiment to test their question. They will make careful observations of their test and control plant. Students will share their observations twice per week using VoiceThread. Students will collaborate with their distance learning partners by asking questions and making predictions via the response features of VoiceThread.

Example questions:
What happens if you cut off half of the leaves?
What happens if you cover some of the leaves with foil?
Will a plant grow without soil?
Will a plant grow upside down?

We are looking for some feedback to get our project started. What are some other questions to investigate? We would likely start with nursery pre-potted plants. Does anyone have suggestions as to the best plants to use?