When we're talking about flowering plants, there are two main types: Monocots and Dicots.  Some examples of monocots are corn, grass, and palm trees.  Dicots include oak trees, daisies, and roses.

There are Five Signs that a plant is either a monocot or a dicot.  Sometimes one of the signs won't help very much, or you won't be able to look at the part of the plant you need to.  Luckily for us, we have five!  If one fails us, then we have other four to fall back on.

The Five Signs:

 

First, lets talk about cotyledons (kot-l-EED-ns).  Cotyledons are inside of a plant's seed, and they are the first baby leaves that the newborn plant will have.  Once the seed germinates (bursts out of its seed), these cotyledons will be able to soak up the sun and provide energy for the growing plant (photosynthesis, baby!)

Let's look at monocots first.  We'll use a kernal of corn as an example - yep, all those little kernels on a corn cob are seeds for a corn plant!  If you were to split apart a piece of corn, you would see one cotyledon.

 

OK, now let's look at a lima bean - a dicot.  If you were to split that open, you would see two cotyledons! 

Hey... wait a sec... mono - cot.  Mono (one) - cot (an abbrev. for cotyledon!)  Great way to remember this!  Same thing for di - cot!  Di (two) - cot (cotyledons)!

Luckily for us, there are more signs than cotyledons to tell whether or not a plant is a monocot or a dicot.  Hey, seeds aren't always around to split apart and examine!  Besides that, sometimes it can be confusing to decide whether there are one or two cotyledons.