3 Plant Activities and a Simple Experiment to Teach the Plant Life Cycle

When do you teach your plant activities unit? Fall or spring? I love teaching the plant life cycle and plant needs! Every year, my students and I grew bean plants out of lima beans. Their progress pics are always so much fun to see. Check out my outline below of how to make your lima bean experiment a breeze, plus other engaging plant activities and lesson plan suggestions your students will love.

Materials needed for the Lima Bean Experiment:

Lima bean science experiment idea for elementary students

Paper Towels
Water
Clear Cups
Black Sharpies
Lima Beans

Student working on lima bean science experiment.

The first step for this fun plant activities experiment is prepping materials! Getting the students to wrap their paper towels into a circle is always tough! But, letting them try and try to get their cups perfect is always fun. When the students get disappointed because their seeds won’t stay on the side of the cup, that’s a learning experience. That’s my opportunity to teach even more science and tell them that their seeds at the bottom of the cup will be an experiment just like the ones on the side of the cup.

Observing the Seed:

We watched the seeds for a few weeks and wrote about what we saw in our learning logs. For a while, the students were drawing and writing about the same thing and getting quite frustrated!

Lima bean in a cup science experiment to teach plant needs

Learning About Plants While We Wait:

There is a lot of waiting in this experiment. It’ll take a while for the bean to grow and sprout. While they’re observing, I suggest starting a plant unit filled with tons of plant activities! I have an engaging plant activities set just for you! Here is a look at fold-and-go books, worksheets, passages, and cut and glue pages from my plant unit that are perfect teaching plants activities!

Plants Activities- reading activities to teach plant life cycle and plant needs

My kids were wild about passages. They are short and sweet and teach the kids what they need to know while keeping them responsible for reading with their comprehension questions at the bottom.