You will need:
A shoe brush (preferably with animal bristles)
A broad leaf
Hammer
Board pins
Piece of carpet or rug (8″x10″)
Piece of wood (8″x10″)
Plastic wrap/Cling wrap
Newspaper
Iron
Conduct this experiment to understand the structure of a leaf, and figure out that leaves have skeletons too!
INSTRUCTIONS
l. Taking your carpet or rug and a piece of wood, hammer the board pins through the carpet into the wood, thus holding the carpet in place over the wood.
- Next, place the leaf with the top side facing upwards onto the carpet-covered wood.
- Very gently holding the leaf in place with one hand, take the shoe brush in your other hand, and slowly brush the leaf in one direction so as to remove the fleshy parts of the leaf.
- Keep brushing the leaf gently until almost all the fleshy part is gone; then turn it over and repeat the process till all that remains is the skeleton.
- Slowly place the skeleton in between 2 sheets of plastic wrap.
- Cover the plastic wrap with newspaper on both sides and ask an adult to iron over the paper gently so that the plastic sticks together may preserve the leaf.
RESULT
You will now have a skeleton of a
leaf preserved between the two sheets
of plastic. Follow the same process on differently shaped leaves and understand how the skeletons differ or are alike.
