Standards (Microsoft
Word Document)
Materials:
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Internet and/or The Butterfly Seeds by Mary Watson
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a world map
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paper
- colored pencils or pens
Background
For most of human history, people have saved and replanted seeds as a means of survival. In addition, some families have saved seeds from favorite or prized plants for many generations. Check out Seeds Feed the World! for more information about the importance of seeds as a food source.
During colonial times, immigrants to the new world often brought seeds from edible and ornamental plants with them to avoid starvation and to remind them of home. Travel between continents was expensive and supply ships were notoriously slow and unreliable. Without modern refrigeration, it was impossible to transport fresh fruits, vegetables, or even grains long distances. The only way to ensure a healthy, nutritious diet was to grow your own fresh foods. Immigrants eventually learned which native plants in their new locations were edible, but it took time to discover these food sources and often it was the harvest from the seeds they’d carried from home that helped them survive their first winter in the new world.
The ornamental seeds and plant slips immigrants carried were also important to their well-being. Many people never returned to their homelands, even to visit the family and friends they’d left behind. Adding some beloved ornamental plants to their new landscape helped them to cope with the emotional toll of being so far from home.
- Introduce your students to the movement of edible plants using National Geographic’s Our Vegetable Travelers. Hang a large world map in your classroom and have students’ research and track the origins of different plants. Draw each plant’s route on the map in a different color. Ask, How did these plants come to travel so far around the world? (People carried the seeds.) Why?
1. Tell the students to imagine that a new planet with similar atmospheric and environmental qualities as Earth has been discovered, and they have been chosen to help start a new colony there. The journey to the planet is long, and students may never return to Earth. Due to space restrictions, each student may only bring one suitcase on the trip. Ask, What will you pack? Specifically, what plants will you bring and how will you carry them to ensure their survival?
2. Accept all answers, listing responses on the board and tallying duplicate answers.
3. Follow up by having students write a diary about their journey. They should include at least one entry before their departure, one entry during their journey, and one entry after they’ve arrived at the new planet. Encourage students to be creative, but ask them to include at least one paragraph in each of the three entries about plants.
Making Connections
- Why did you choose these specific plants to take with you? What conditions will you need to provide for the seeds to ensure they will grow on the new planet?
- What kind of environmental challenges might you face when growing these seeds on the new planet? Will you sow all your seeds at once, or plan to save some for a later planting?
- Explore ways that astronauts use plants in space.
- Teach students how to harvest different kinds of seeds. At the end of the current growing season, collect seeds from your garden to use next year. If you have extra seeds, you can sell them as a fundraiser or donate them to a local community garden.
- Dissect fruits and/or vegetables and compare the number of seeds inside each. Do all fruits of the same type contain the same number of seeds? Why do you think the number of seeds varies? Try germinating the seeds in soil or in plastic bags with moist paper towels. What percent of the seeds germinate? What does this tell us?
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