Fruit Dissection!

Today we dissected apples, green peppers, peaches, and tomatoes to launch our "Structures of Life" science unit. We separated the seed from the fruit and counted how many seeds were in each fruit. We described the properties (size, shape, color, texture, smell) of each seed, and discussed why fruits have seeds. Also, even though in everyday language we might describe peppers, squash, and tomatoes as "vegetables," in scientific terms they are fruits because they are the parts of a plant that contain seeds. Vegetable just means "edible vegetation" and the fruits of many plants are edible!

Afterwards, we got to eat the fruits! Any scraps we had left over we fed to our hungry red wigglers in our classroom vermacomposting system.