Friday, January 23, 2009

Lima Beans

I absolutely can NOT believe I forgot to tell you this story. It is an important one. And it even has a moral....sort of.

Last Thursday, the class and I started our unit on plants. And, like any other warm blooded elementary school teacher, I decided to do the old stand by....The lima bean in the baggie.

So on Thursday, the students investigated (fancy word for : drove me crazy with using their magnifying glasses to look at each other's mouths/up each other's noses,) dry lima beans. As they left that day, they plopped their handful into a bin to soak overnight.

The next day they each pulled out ONE bean and put it in a baggie with a paper towel, taped to the window. After that was done, we still had about 60 beans in the pot of water. We also had several kids absent, so I decided to just leave them until Monday.

Unfortunately for me, Monday was MLK day, and we had no school. Also unfortunately for me, the directions, which I had read, by the way, stated to "not leave the lima beans for more than 24 hours for they will begin to ferment."

They were not kidding.

I walked into the room on Tuesday morning and the first thing I thought was "Gee, give me a bucket so I can puke! What is that smell?" My nostrils led me over to the culprit. The vat of lima beans.

The pot was now filled with 'corn' yellow colored water and the entire room was stinky. It took me about 20 minutes to dispose of the toxic mess appropriately, but in the end, I learned, that science manuals do their best to NOT lie. 

I should really pay more attention to them.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hahahaha..."vat of lima beans". :)