Students start the sweet potato project in February with the goal of planting in mid-May.  We used to give each student a sweet potato to grow slips in a cup of water along the classroom windowsill.  At planting time, each student had his or her own sweet potato to plant.  After a few of years, we found the process problematic.  We needed to acquire many sweet potatoes each year for our roughly 14 first grade classes - though we are grateful to the Kroger Company for their generous donation then and now.  Also, 25 or so cups of water and sweet potato took up a lot of space along the windows, and teachers spent much time monitoring the water quality and level in the cups.

So we have simplified our process down to requiring 6-7 sweet potatoes per class.  One is started in a cup of water; the rest are shared by groups of 4-5 students and started in soil.  These are our "mother" sweet potatoes.  Our soil sweet potatoes are planted in the large-sized, plastic salad containers that are donated to us.  The focus of the activity has changed from solely preparing individual sweet potatoes to forming hypotheses about how sweet potato slips will develop in soil versus water.  The end result is the same - to plant and grow sweet potatoes - but instead of planting individual sweet potatoes, students plant individual slips that are removed from the primary "mother" sweet potato. 

We remove slips as they become about 3 inches long and pot them in soil so they will develop roots.  The "mother" sweet potatoes in the window will continue to produce slips.  Rooted slips and the "mother" sweet potato are planted in Granny's Sweet Potato Patch after the danger of frost is past.  As we continue to refine our process, our hope is to continue to increase our production of slips for planting Granny's patch and to offer sweet potato slips for sale at our spring plant sale fundraiser.