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Friday 29 February 2008

Transpiration

As part of our Geography, we are working through this book

(click on pictures)


We are using it as a starting point and then adding to it as needed. This week in the discussion of transpiration, the books experiment was to make a bottle garden, but we wanted to do something a little easier, so used an experiment from another book called Amazing Planet Earth - isbn 1843092026 (sorry Amazon doesn't seem to stock it - I bought it from Borders for £4.99)Apparently it's an Australian book view it *here*

This involved getting a couple of plants



Wrapping them in clear plastic bags, (I used the plastic sheets you put A4 paper into binders with)and sealing the bottom with cellotape.




Then we put the plants on a sunny window sill for about 3 hours - you will notice that the plastic is clear.



After about 3 hours, you can see that the leaves of the plants are transpiring, where they give off water into the atmosphere - look carefully and you can see that the plastic has steamed up.


If left long enough in a sunny spot, the water turns to droplets, falling back down on the plants.


This is part of our water cycle project, the children drew the process, and will label photos to go into their Geography folders.