Flower Unit

Flower Unit schedule

One of the best parts of our flower unit was simply dissecting all the different kinds of flowers we found in our yard. (This would have been even better if we had a microscope, but a magnifying glass worked pretty well.)

It was so exciting to see the different structures in real life after seeing them in books! Don't ask me why, but it was.

Some interesting supplementary websites: here and here. My kids really liked seeing the flowers as bees or hummingbirds see them.

Here's one of the worksheets I made about flower anatomy (the older boys very much like filling in worksheets, and the little ones like coloring on them)

and the answer key.

Colored flower experiment---this was a great idea, and I've seen it work before, but this time it took three days for the flowers to look very colorful, and even then the colors were just faint. It was disappointing. I think maybe we put too little of the food coloring in the water? You can read about the experiment here.

We took nature walks or bike rides every day of this unit, concentrating on different things each time (e.g. looking for seeds and pods one day, trying to name the flowers another day, looking for edible flowers another day). We loved doing that. We took baggies to collect specimens in, and carried sketchbooks. It was kind of hard to sketch as much as they would have liked because it was HOT and we didn't want to stop for long. Some of them finished sketching when they got home.

Our transpiration demonstration---see how much water has collected in the bag? You can read more about this here.

We also tried to make origami flowers, but the instructions in the book we got were so terrible that we (I) finally gave up in disgust (which made some of the children cry). Later Abraham looked up some instructions on the computer and made a flower that was pretty good. I'd still like to get a better book and try again.

We also made rose-petal perfume, which I always used to do when I was little. We just made the sit-in-the-sun kind, not the kind where you add alcohol and distilled water and let it condense and then drip down. (Too complicated!)

Sam's talk on symbolism and flowers in art was really good. The boys seemed to grasp the concepts quite readily, which is probably just because Sam is so good at explaining things. I loved learning about flower symbolism in popular movies, and I also learned a lot I didn't know about the fleur de lis. Very interesting!