psocoptera

Project: So Did It Grow? Huh? Huh?
Materials: sprouted potatoes planted in a pot
Explanatory details: Back in June we planted our sprouted potatoes, and I added more dirt a couple times during the summer. The other day I noticed that the $%^*# squirrels had dug up and gnawed a couple of small potatoes - I hadn't put mesh over the pot - so it was clearly time to get in there and see if there were any potatoes left that the squirrels hadn't found.
How did it go: Great! Junie had a lot of fun digging for the potatoes (although, warning, the 2-year-old digging method involves a lot of throwing handfuls of dirt into the air). I found that it worked well to transfer the dirt to an empty pot (checking for tiny taters). Also I let Junie find most of the potatoes, by just brushing some dirt off the top when I found them, so they were more obvious for her to spot. We got about fifteen potatoes, ranging from golf-ball-sized down to garbanzo-sized.
Things we talked about: The potatoes grew from the roots of the potato plant, that we planted.
What Junie got out of it: Besides the fun of the digging, she helped me count them, and enjoyed eating them too! (I boiled them and salted them.) I think she would have happily eaten all of them but we made her share them with us. If you wanted to do a potato-growing project with an older kid, it might be fun to weigh the seed potatoes and weigh the harvested potatoes and see whether you got more out than you put in. (We didn't - maaaybe if we had the ones the squirrels got?)