STEM Storytime: Seeds in Autumn

Saturday STEM Storytime participants chose to read The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle, about a seed that gets blown from a flower in autumn, then travels on the wind to a far-away location. There it stays, on the ground, under the snow, in the mud, until Spring. I bet you can guess what happens next!!

Moving on the wind is one of the ways that seeds travel in the fall. They also get moved by animals. Squirrels take acorns and bury them, birds eat berries and fruit and poop out the seeds, dogs (and kids!) run through fields and get seeds stuck to their pants and socks! Seeds are clever to find so many ways to get around!

We donned out safety glasses and set to work finding seeds in all sorts of dead-looking plants and flowers. We used magnifying glasses to closely investigate our findings. Using tweezers, we pulled marigold and cosmos seeds from dead flower heads. We found that hard iris pods make good shakers when the seeds rattle inside them. We noticed that dead lupin pods had opened up into spirals and wondered if the seeds were f-l-u-n-g out into the air! We crumbled the center of a dead sunflower to find the shiny black sunflower seeds all lined up in a pattern underneath. We carefully opened a milkweed pod and - more patterns! We saw the lined-up, organized seeds tucked away inside the pod. Once the air from the room got to the milkweed seeds, can you guess what happened? Up and away they went, all over the Children's Room! Wheeee!!

Before kids left, we gathered seeds to take home in half-envelopes, and labeled them so we'd remember what plants they came from. We'll scatter them at home, then see what happens! But we know that nothing will happen until fall and winter are over - and Spring comes back, so they can grow into plants again!