What's alive?? You'd be surprised...

My science class conducted a bit of an experiment last week. The purpose of this experiment was to see if we could classify certain objects as "alive", "product of a living thing", "was alive now dead"or "never alive". We took a baggie and in the baggie we had a wet paper towel. Folded up in the wet paper towel was plants (with their roots) that we had gathered from outside, a piece of a straw, bird seed, sand, pop corn kernels, beans, cotton ball, penny, tooth pick, and a rock. Each of these objects we had to list in the spread sheet under one of the given categories above. We allowed the plants to peak out the top of the paper towel but they still had to be in the bag which we inflated with air and stuck by the window so they could get sunlight. A week later we gathered our bags and opened them. To our surprise our plants were still living and there were more plants growing!We had to now put a mark under the proper category these items should belong in. Our group got all but two right, but the two we got wrong were shocking to us! Below you can see a picture of the items that were in our paper towel. If you look at the popcorn kernels and the beans you can see plants sprouting out of them. I was shocked that our plants were still living, but on top of that I did not expect at all to see new types of plants forming and branching out of the corn and beans! I am still a little dumb founded to think that popcorn kernels and beans could sprout and produce a plant like that, in such short of time! I felt this was a really neat experiment and I strongly encourage anyone to try it with almost any ages of kids!