About

The Story of the Seed is a yearlong project where students follow the life of a domesticated plant from seed to seed. The project was to designed to connect to, be threaded through, and tie together all of the eight units of Justin Bursch’s secondary-level introductory life science class (Biology 1-2) at Willow Glen High School. Students in this course are assigned by the teacher to project working groups within the first two weeks of the school year. Each group receives seeds of one particular cultivar of Brassica oleracea (examples of common Brassica oleracea representatives are broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage). The seeds are germinated during the first experiment of the year, after which the students place all sprouted seeds into growing trays or small pots. These trays and pots are placed under grow lights to grow larger before transplanting out into one of the raised beds in the school’s main garden. After selecting and transplanting the strongest and healthiest ones of their plants into the garden, the students in each group closely monitor the growth and development of their young plants and follow them (hopefully) all the way to the flowering and fruiting stages of the plants' life cycle. Throughout the project students ask and answer their own questions as well as those posed by the teacher, perform independent research, make predictions, write and refine hypotheses, make careful measurements, take photographs, record and analyze data, draw conclusions, and maintain a blog where they present all of the former.