Shady Science: How Does the Sun Affect Plants?

By Candice and DeAndre

We are trying to grow a garden at our school. Some of the plants were dying and we wanted to keep the plants healthy. We wanted to find out if the plants needed more water and sunlight.

We went outside and found all of the plants that started to grow. They had a lot of water because of the rain. We saw that all of the flowers were strong and healthy and were growing.

We went to different parts of the lot to see where the sunlight was. In the morning, part of the sun was on the lot. At 12: 00 the sun was all over the lot. In the afternoon some of the lot was in the shade again.

To start our experiment we got two plants. We put one in the sunlight on the windowsill. Then we put the other plants in a crate and covered the crate so that the plant was in the dark. We waited and the plant in the light started to grow leaves and flowers. The plants in the dark grew but later started dying. The pink flowers and leaves started drying up.

The flowers in the sun kept going as long as we watered it. The plant in the dark died much earlier than the plant in the light.

If we could investigate more, we would put dirt in the cup and use seeds instead of plants because the plants we used were not all the way in the dirt. We could take it outside and put it in the sunlight so that it could get more sunlight.