How does cotton grow? What does it look like? How is it harvested? Who invented the cotton Gin? What is the cotton belt? We answered all of these questions thanks to an impromtu lesson on the cotton plant. My mother has some gracious friends living in GA who sent us a real sample of cotton to use in our lesson (hands on learning is way better than text book!) I found a wealth of knowledge on this website:
http://www.cottonsjourney.com/storyofcotton/page3.asp
Grandma was also able to briefly stop by and add her knowledge to our lesson as well. We learned that the cotton plant can only be successfully grown in the cotton belt (a spread of the lower states with long warm growing seasons) as it takes 25 weeks, or 150 frost free days to get to the end stages of a mature cotton plant.
http://www.cottonsjourney.com/storyofcotton/page3.asp
Grandma was also able to briefly stop by and add her knowledge to our lesson as well. We learned that the cotton plant can only be successfully grown in the cotton belt (a spread of the lower states with long warm growing seasons) as it takes 25 weeks, or 150 frost free days to get to the end stages of a mature cotton plant.
We learned that with the invention of Eli Whitney's cotton gin (short for engine) that production of lint volume for workers was increased from 1lb to 50lbs per day. Since cotton is so light we decided to weigh some to see just how much this would be...
This is the largest size bag of cotton balls that can be purchased at Walmart (it was about half gone) so we figured that the largest bag of cotton that we could purchase would still be just shy of 1 lb. Imagine 50 lbs!
We discussed how hot it would have been to stand in the fields picking all day, and then as we looked closely at the cotton plant that we had we saw that there were small burs or prickers on the bottom of the cotton stalks which would have made it quite scratchy to pick. (though maybe not as bad as picking blackberries!) We discussed what was made from cotton and checked the tags on all of our clothing to see who was wearing cotton.
The most interesting thing I learned was that the cotton seed is about the same size as an orange seed, though shrouded in fibers. I don't know why I never thought of cotton having a seed before. Those little bitty pieces in between my son's hands are the cotton seeds we picked out of one of the locks during our investigation.
The most interesting thing I learned was that the cotton seed is about the same size as an orange seed, though shrouded in fibers. I don't know why I never thought of cotton having a seed before. Those little bitty pieces in between my son's hands are the cotton seeds we picked out of one of the locks during our investigation.
We all decided that the natural cotton was actually softer then what came in that bag from walmart and though not quite as white (as the walmart cotton is bleached) it was surprisingly similar to the end result of what is purchased in the store.
We had a lot of fun and even mom learned new information... Thanks so much to the Bakers from GA for helping us with our special homeschool science lesson!
