Article: When things go wrong, the results can turn out right: failed germination leads a fifth-grade classroom into inquiry.

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When you teach science you know that students are often amazed by demonstrations and experiments. Sometimes the teacher can be surprised, too. For several years my fifth-grade students have raised and observed plants, kept journals, and analyzed the functions of the parts of a plant. This is always rated as a favorite activity when students do an evaluation at the end of the year. But this year a near disaster taught me a lesson and increased the value of the activity for my students. Not only did students learn about plants, but also they now understand what a variable is and how scientists use variables to test hypotheses. This is a ...

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