Primary Schoolchildren – Ages 8-11

Aims:

To introduce agriculture as a managed system that has environmental impacts, and how farmers employ practices such as growing pulses to minimize these impacts.

Objectives:

• Students will understand how nutrients are passed from the soil to the plant through its root system.
• Students will understand nitrogen-fixing as a concept.
• Students will learn about symbiosis through the role of rhizobia in growing pulses.

Resources:

1. Instructions for growing pulse plants in a can, with lead questions (from teacher pack).
2. Diagram of nitrogen-fixation with rhizobia (from teacher pack).
3. Example of crop rotation (from teacher pack).
4. Crop cards 1 to 5 (from teacher pack).

Suggestions for further development:

• Visit a local farm or invite a farmer to speak in class.
• Pupils could record how their plants grow over a period of time – making observations recorded as diagrams/graphs etc.
• Pupils could grow alternative pulse plants such as chickpeas and navy beans and compare rates of growth.
• Pupils could research how to give their plants the highest yield through different watering and feeding techniques,
  living in symbiosis with rhizobia, or even planting different crops together.
• Pupils could research (at www.iyop.net) the impact that pulses in crop rotation have on sustainability.