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Pollination Demonstration! Pollination Demonstration Ages: 7-11 Time: 15 minutes Location: Indoors Objective: Students will Service Departments Represented: Materials: Procedure: 1. Start out by asking the kids, "If you knew how to build a really good birdhouse and you wanted to tell someone else how to do it, how could you communicate that to them?" The children may reply tell them, show them, or write it down. Well plants don't make birdhouses but they do make seeds and they like to exchange information with other plants on how to make better seeds. They do this through pollination." 2. Ask the children what they know about pollen and if they have ever seen any. Typical response will be that it makes you sneeze and gets all over cars and sidewalks in the springtime. Tell them that pollen is like a little packet of information which goes from one plant to another plant which tells the plants how to grow seeds. Ask why plants would want to exchange information on how to grow seeds. Answer: Not all seeds grow the same. Some may grow faster and some may grow taller and these are things that would be helpful for the plants. 3. Get two volunteers to pretend to be plants and have them stand some distance away from each other so they can not reach with their hands. Each one gets several pieces of pollen stuck on their chest and shoulders with different messages. 4. Tell the children that the plants want to exchange their pollen information so they can create seeds that grow better plants. 5. Tell the two children to exchange pollen, but before they can do it remind them that their roots are holding them to the ground. How else can they do it? 6. If you are lucky, one of the children will try throwing the pollen to the other child but it will fall short. Point out that this tactic did not work. But what if the plant had lots of pollen to throw? Take this opportunity to tell the children about plants that use the wind to carry pollen like pines, oaks, and grasses. But it takes a lot of pollen to do it this way and most of it falls on our cars, sidewalks, roads, etc. These two plants only have a little pollen, however, so how can they exchange pollen information? 7. Answer: use bees or other insects. Get another volunteer to be a bee using the bee puppet and have them fly off to another part of the room. 8. Point out that now there is a bee to carry the pollen, but bees don't work for free. What are the plants going to offer him/her for the work. Answer: nectar. Give each flower a nectar cup and say that many flowers have nectar glands down inside the petals. 9. The bee now has a reason to visit the flowers, but
how does he/she know where it is? Two answers. 10. Now the bee knows exactly where the nectar is, so he/she goes after it. While sipping the nectar from inside the flower, the bee bumps into the anther (male part) which is covered with pollen (this is where the flower model may be helpful) and gets some on his/her back. The student plant should stick the construction paper pollen to the back of the bee. Then the bee flies away to the next flower. While at the next flower, the bee again bumps into the anther and gets pollen on his back, but he/she also rubs up against the stigma (female part) where the pollen from the first flower is deposited. Now the bee can fly back to the first flower again where some of the pollen from the second flower is left. Now the flowers have exchanged their pollen. 11. Be sure to leave one or two pieces of pollen on the bee. When the bee returns to the hive, the extra pollen will be removed and mixed with honey to feed to the larvae (baby bees). It is very nutritious. You can often see all the extra pollen a bee has collected because they scrap it into large masses on their back legs. These are called "pollen baskets". 12. While collecting the skirts and cups ask, "Now that the flower has been pollinated, does it need the petals and nectar any more?" Why not? What does the plant make after the flower dies. Follow up questions: |