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How Plants Reproduce: A Garden Adventure with Pip

How Plants Reproduce: A Garden Adventure with Pip

Learn how plants reproduce from seeds, bulbs, tubers, runners and cuttings by pollinating flowers, digging up bulbs and taking cuttings with Pip.

  • Ages 8–11
  • About 40 min
  • Some thinking
  • Plants
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What you'll learn

  • What reproduction means, and the words parent plant and offspring
  • How pollination and fertilisation let a flower make seeds
  • The flowering plant life cycle, from pollination to germination
  • How bulbs and tubers store food and grow new plants
  • How to grow a new plant from a runner or a cutting
  • The difference between sexual and asexual reproduction in plants

Chapter by chapter

  1. Why plants reproduce: parents and offspring

    Year 5 science · 1

  2. How flowers make seeds: pollination to germination

    Year 5 science · 1

  3. New plants from bulbs and tubers

    Year 5 science · 1

  4. New plants from runners and cuttings

    Year 5 science · 1

  5. Seeds and copies: two parents or one

    Year 5 science · 1

  6. Final quiz: how plants reproduce (10 questions)

What the chapters cover in the national curriculum in England:

  1. Year 5 science: Describe the life process of reproduction in some plants and animals

About this adventure

How Plants Reproduce is an interactive science game that teaches children aged 8–11 how flowering plants make seeds and how new plants grow from bulbs, tubers, runners and cuttings. It follows the Year 5 science curriculum for England.

Players guide a bee between flowers to see pollination, watch a pollen tube reach an ovule for fertilisation, and spread seeds by wind and by bird. They slice open a daffodil bulb, sprout a potato tuber, root a strawberry runner and take a mint cutting step by step, as a gardener would.

Along the way they learn that seeds come from two parents, so seedlings can look a little different, while bulbs, tubers, runners and cuttings make copies of one parent plant. A narrator reads every step aloud, and a 10-question final quiz, including spelling the key words, checks what they remember.

Questions and answers

How do plants reproduce, in simple words?

Plants reproduce in two main ways. Flowering plants make seeds after pollen from one flower joins an ovule in another, while some plants grow copies of themselves from bulbs, tubers, runners or cuttings, which need only one parent.

What is the difference between pollination and fertilisation?

Pollination is when pollen moves from the anther of one flower to the sticky stigma of another, often carried by insects or the wind. Fertilisation happens afterwards, when a pollen tube grows down and the pollen joins an ovule, which can then become a seed.

What is asexual reproduction in plants?

Asexual reproduction is when a new plant grows from just one parent, so it is an exact copy of that parent. Daffodil bulbs, potato tubers, strawberry runners and stem cuttings are all examples of plants reproducing this way.

What age is this plant reproduction game for?

The game suits children aged 8 to 11 and matches the Year 5 science curriculum in England. Younger players can follow along because every instruction is read aloud and the screens use short sentences and lots of tapping, dragging and sorting.

What does the game include and how long does it take?

It has five chapters and a 10-question final quiz, and takes about 40 minutes to play through. Players can pick any chapter from the garden map, stop at any time and carry on later from where they left off.

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