MORE ABOUT WHAT PLANTS DO

Perhaps we're just not attuned to the experimental approach, but so many of the projects in this second volume of Seeing Do seem hardly worth the effort. Thus weighing fresh and then baked spinach to discover ""How much water is there in plants"" merely quantifies a common observation of anyone who ever cooks spinach, and an experiment in trying to grow plants from several kinds of leaves shows that this can be done with African violets but not bean plants, but without giving any hint why this is so. Similarly, children will come across the word osmosis in researching ""What effect does salt water have on plants?"" though the concept is never followed up. They can graph a growth curve for a bean plant (and even, if they think to read ahead, a ""better growth curve"" in experiment #2) but the significance, if any, of the s-shaped curve is not explained. The activities -- mostly germinating bean seeds and other common plants and some weighing with a kitchen scale -- are easy enough, but without some supplemental material on plant life (and possibly also on the experimental method) this can hardly be expected to sustain interest.