Journey North International Plant Study

Tulips Tulips

Is Spring Early this Spring?
Mrs Koontz's Class Research

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Research from the Classroom

Dear Journey North,
We reported our tulips emerged on January 19, 2006 and commented that it had been a really mild winter. Our class got your letter asking whether this year was especially early. We don’t think it seemed so unusual to have the tulips emerge this month because it has happened before. We looked at the last five years of data and the tulips also emerged in January in 2004. In 2002 and 2003 they emerged in February. In 2005 the tulips emerged in March.
Most of us predicted the tulips would emerge in March.

We went to the Journey North website to look for other schools that had tulips that emerged and we noticed that they were all on the coasts. We think the ocean holds the sun’s heat. If this is true we wondered why more of the schools haven’t reported emerged tulips. We emailed the school in Florida because their data said they planted on January 10. They wrote back and told us they put their bulbs in the refrigerator to fool them before planting. This was a surprise.

As of today, January 25, we have 5 bulbs that have emerged. We are very proud of our garden.

Mrs. Koontz’s fourth grade class
Rockledge Elementary School
Bowie, Maryland

Students brainstormed how to display tulip emergence data.

* Note from Mrs. Koontz - Keeping a tulip journal
My students have been writing in a tulip journal since 2001. This group has added their entries periodically and so they immediately went to the journal to find the data. We had the last 4 years but needed 2003 data so we went to the home page and clicked on tulips. We then went to frequently asked questions (FAQ's) and found the data. I worked with the students on the website. I then asked the students how they could display the data. They came up with two ideas so we created a line plot and a graph.
-Mrs. Koontz