When students at Merrimack Valley Middle School returned to sixth-grade science teacher Kristen Bean Warren's classroom on the Wednesday after Memorial Day weekend, they encountered a mystery.
Vegetable plants germinating in a hydroponic growing system in the classroom since March – green and healthy-looking the previous Friday – had suddenly withered and turned brown. Something – but it was not immediately clear what – had happened during the previous five days.
"Is it a root problem? Is it a nutrient problem? Is it a light problem?" Bean Warren asked the nine students in the exploratory class, a quarterly elective program that MVMS offers its students. "You need to come to a conclusion of what our plants are lacking."
The incorporation of hands-on agricultural projects into Bean Warren's science courses began in 2020 and has grown little by little since. Next year, it will blossom. Last week, Bean Warren secured a $6,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm to School program to introduce a hydroponic growing system into the middle school's greenhouse, and to upgrade the greenhouse in other ways.
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