A Little Bit More
Wheat is a member of the grass family that includes the grasses known as cereals or cereal grains. Other important cereals include rice, corn, barley, sorghum, oats, millet, triticale, and rye. But wheat is the most widely planted cereal worldwide. The leading wheat producing countries in order of production are: China, India, U.S., France, Russia, Canada, Germany, Pakistan, and Australia.
It is believed that wheat was domesticated about 11,000 years ago in the Tigris and Euphrates River valley (what is today Iraq) but people were eating wheat’s ancestral plant at least 17,000 years ago. More than 8,000 years ago, we have evidence that Swiss lake dwellers ground and mixed wheat with water and then baked it into an unleavened “bread”. We also know the Egyptians cultivated and ate wheat almost 5,000 years ago.
Of course, today’s wheat doesn’t look at all like its ancestral plant. Wild Einkorn or One-seeded Emmer has been found in ancient villages in Egypt and southwestern Asia’s Fertile Crescent and is believed to be the parent plant that gave rise to what we know as wheat today. The ability to cultivate grain is what historians feel is the beginning of civilization. Once farming practices allowed people to settle down in one place with some free time to devote to activities other than their immediate survival, crafts, the arts, and even communication could evolve into what we think of as “civilization”. Hard to believe that something as simple as a kind of grass could have such a profound effect on humans!
Activities
Science and Art - Seedy
Objectives: See some actual grass seed heads
Materials: Collected grasses that are in seed
Almost all of us have seen grasses that have gone to seed but few of us have ever paid much attention to them. Depending on where you live, students should be able to bring in some seed heads from local grasses. Once students know what to look for, they’ll quickly realize that they’ve seen these many times before but it never really “clicked” as to what they were looking at. This is a good end-of-summer activity that your students can participate in. You may want to show them some of the pictures on these websites first so they know what kinds of things they’re looking for before they go out looking themselves.
Here are a few places where you can tell students to look for grass seed heads:
Yards (the poorer they’re kept, the more likely to find what they want)
Cracks in sidewalks
Areas between sidewalk and street
Parks (any areas that haven’t been well maintained will be best)
Gardens (around the edges of flower or vegetable areas)
Any wild areas that are sunny and not too crowded with tall plants
(areas along highways are good and although too dangerous for children, you may be able to collect some there)
Once students find some samples, be sure they note on paper (have this accompany each sample by simply making a tube around the grass stems) what kind of place they found their particular grass seed head in. Now have them bring them in and display your assortment for all to see. What they find will depend on the part of the country you live in as well as the kind of human habitat (urban, suburban, rural) they live in too. The more varied your students’ living situations, the more varied your grasses should be. They only need one or two examples of any given grass from their site. They can pull up one or two of the grass heads and bring them in to school for close inspection.
Students should be able to see how the seeds are arranged on the seed-head, get a notion about the size of the seeds, see if there are any “unusual” features about the seeds, and get a feel for what wheat seeds are kind-of like too. Also, have students compare grasses from similar habitats to see if they’re the same or different species. This is one of those everyday items in our world that we rarely look twice at but should. You may all be pleasantly surprised at the beauty and complexity of the seed-heads you find.
Once you’ve examined your grasses, see how you can display them in an attractive way. You may want to glue them to colored-paper, place them in a vase, mount them on a cloth backing, or insert them into an arrangement that’s already constructed but can use a bit of “spiffing” up.
One Step Further
Once you’ve assembled and examined your seed-heads, you may want to go one step further and plant them. Many grasses (especially those growing in the colder areas of North America) need a dormant period to prepare them for germination. There are many websites that discuss stratification (cold dormancy period in preparation for germination) and can walk you through this process. After the appropriate dormancy period you can plant these seeds in flats or pots and see what develops. You may even want to have a small “grass garden” somewhere so you can plant your seeds outside. In any event, I think you’ll find that grasses really aren’t boring - the more you know about them, the more interesting they become!
Basic info on Seed Treatment (stratification): www.allgowild.com
Key Concepts
Food Webs /Food Pyramids
Questions
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