Make Grass Heads With Wheatgrass
A Fun Kids STEM Activity
My son is only two, but recently we introduced him to the word of biology by making these 'Grass Heads' using wheatgrass.
It was really simple to make and very inexpensive. In this post, we take a look at the whole process so you too can have fun making grass heads with your children.
Our Wheatgrass Grass Heads Video
We thought it would be fun to make a short video about how we made the grass heads. We show you how we made a grass head from a glass jar, and at the end, we did a time lapse watching them grow. The grass head timelapse is really awesome, and suggest you check it out towards the end of this video.
What You Need to Make Grass Heads
Here is a list of items that we used to make our grass heads. We also have a picture below.
Jars: We used recycled glass jars for our grass heads. We bought them from a charity store (LifeLine) in our home town for 20 cents each, $1 in total. If you don't want to use glass, you can just use plastic cups or even egg shells.
Soil: Just regular dirt from the garden will work fine. We bought seed raising mix by Osmacote, just because we were doing a timelapse indoors and wanted to make sure they had all of their nutrients.
Wheatgrass Seeds: We just grabbed a packet of Mr Fothergill's Wheatgrass Seeds from the local hardware store. We used wheatgrass, but you can just use regular grass or any other grass-like plants.
Plain Stickers: You will need something to stick to the jars to make faces. We used a packet of blank sticker labels. Just cut out the shapes and draw on the eyes. If you are using a non-see-through cup, then you will be able to just draw the faces directly on the cup. You can be plain like us, or be as colourful as you like. Let your kids get really creative with this part of the activity.
Tools Needed: The tools needed depends on the style you are making, but all we needed for ours was a marker to draw the eyes, scissors to cut out the face from the stickers and a watering can for watering the grass heads.
Step by Step Guide to Making Grass Heads
Here is our step by step guide to making grass heads, the kids' STEM activity. These instructions are to make the exact ones in our pictures but feel free to modify them to suit your equipment or ideas. Once you have gathered all of your resources, here are the steps:
Step 1: Make Faces
We made really simple faces by cutting out eyes and mouths from blank stickers. You can get creative here, but we just turned some really simple shapes into faces. We used a marker to draw on the eyeballs. Once cut out, we peeled off the backing and stuck them to our jars.
Step 2: Fill With Soil
We now have our jars with faces, so it was time to head outside and fill them with soil. Push the soil down, but don't compact it too much. Also, leave some room at the top for the seeds and another shallow layer of soil.
Step 3: Place in the Seeds
Place some wheatgrass seeds in each of your jars. We placed quite a few, but only one layer thick. Time over, we may have placed even more.
Step 4: More Soil
Once your layer of seeds is in the grass heads, you can cover the seeds with a layer of soil.
Step 5: Water the Grass Heads
The grass heads are now finished off by adding in some water. Don't saturate too much. You just need a good amount to keep everything moist.
Step 6: Place in the Sun
The wheatgrass grass heads are now complete, and you just have to wait for them to grow. Place them in a sunny, or partly sunny room, maybe on a window sill.
Step 7: Water
You need to make sure the grass heads don't dry out. We watered ours each day with just a little water. Because ours were made of glass, we could see the water in the bottom of the jar so we knew we were not saturating them.
STEM & Science Activity
The grass heads are a great introduction to biology. The grass grows quite quickly once it gets going, and they will be able to notice the growth each day.
You can even get the kids to measure and record the growth each day to see when the plants grew the fastest.
Feel free to give the grass heads a haircut and watch the regrowth happen.
Grass Head Time Lapse
In the video at the top of the page, we did a time lapse of the grass growing. You too could take a time lapse if you have the right gear. Here are a few tips on how we took the time lapse of the grass heads. Read our guide on how to take a timelapse of plants.
Dedicated Camera: We had a dedicated camera. You will not get a great time lapse if you have to set the camera up each time, you need to leave it there.
No Movement: Each shot has to be in the exact place. No movement in between each photo.
Same Lighting: This is the tricky part. You need to use the exact same amount of light for each photo. We have a dedicated area for timelapse that is completely dark, only lit by our LED camera lights. This ensures that every photo has the exact amount of light.
Photo Intervals: Calculating how often you need to take a photo is well covered on the internet, so we won't go into the calculations here. But, for this timelapse, we took one photo every three seconds to give us our final video.
Overall
We hope you enjoyed our video, and have fun making your own grass heads at home. It is a fun and cheap STEM activity for kids. Please feel free to leave a comment about your thoughts and ideas.
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