Celery Experiment

Our inquiry on living things has led to an interest in growing plants. Students planted bean seeds and sunflower seeds and are helping to care for their plants by watering them. As students watered the soil of their plants, they began to wonder how the water traveled from the soil into the plant and out to the leaves.

To answer this question, we conducted a celery experiment. We filled four glasses with water and then added food colouring to the water. Then we put a stalk of celery in each glass and predicted what might happen. Within an hour we observed that the celery stalks began to change colour. We left the celery in the dye overnight, and noticed that the leaves became almost completely saturated with colour. We concluded that tiny tubes in the plant draw the water up from the roots like a straw.