Mushrooms and Broccoli....yuck!

This term, Year 5 have been learning about vertebrates and invertebrates. In today's lesson Mrs Martin gave us a plate with a piece of Broccoli and a piece of mushroom. We were worried she was going to ask us to eat these horrid vegetables! Luckily it was all in the name of Science!

To begin with we discussed the five kingdoms (categories) of living things:

1. Animals

2. Plants

3. Bacteria (monera)

4. Fungi

5. Protista- single cell animals and plants

We learnt plants make their own food using sunlight in a process called photosynthesis. Plants are green.

Fungi absorb food through the ground.

Mrs Martin tried to trick us with seaweed. She asked us what Kingdom seaweed belongs to. We told her we thought it belonged to the plant kingdom. But it's brown? Why is seaweed brown? It's not dirty. It's not because it has dried out. It's not dead. It's not because of the temperature. Sometimes plants don't appear to be green (but are actually green) as they need to be green in order to go through the process of photosynthesis.

Mrs Martin poured boiling water over the brown seaweed and it turned green! When she put the seaweed into the boiling water the brown dissolved and was left in the water.

We documented the findings of our experiments of a table and drew labelled diagrams.