Flower Unit Celebration

We like to have a unit "celebration" when possible at the end of units…we used to only do it sometimes, but the children have been insisting on it more and more lately. For our Flower Unit Celebration we basically just made some flower-ish foods and called it good. It was exciting enough because I let them decorate cakes, and they love decorating cakes! 

We made rose petal jelly, lavender and rose syrups, and sugared flowers for the tops of the cakes. All easy, and all beautiful!

Rose Petal Jelly 

1 cup edible rose petals 

1 1/2 cups water 

juice of 1 lemon 

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar 

1 package Sure-Jell pectin 

Combine the rose petals, 3/4 cup water and lemon juice in a blender. Blend until smooth. Slowly add the sugar and blend well. 

Bring the remaining 3/4 cup water to a boil in a small saucepan. Stir in the pectin and boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly. 

Pour the hot mixture into the blender with the other ingredients and blend 1 minute. Pour into sterilized jars and seal. 

Rose Petal Drink

Petals from 3 full-bloom roses

5 cups water

1/2 tsp. lemon juice

3 tbsp. sugar

Instructions

Boil water. Add rose petals and lemon juice to the boiling water, turn off heat and let stand for 6-10 hours. 

Drain into a pitcher. Discard petals. Add sugar to the rose water and stir. Let cool in the refrigerator or freezer. Serve.

We made syrups with rose petals and lavender (we had to buy the lavender since we didn't have it in our garden at the time)—they are easy; here is one recipe. You basically just boil sugar and water with rose or lavender petals until it concentrates into a syrup. They look so pretty!

And then we used the syrups to make Italian Cream Sodas. So good!

For sugared flowers, you blend up sugar in the blender to make superfine sugar. (It becomes almost powdery, but it doesn't have the cornstarch or whatever it is they add to actual powdered sugar.) Then you dip/paint each petal in egg white, sprinkle on the sugar, and let them dry. They look so pretty and taste so flowery and sweet! We used rose petals, violets (I don't know how we had violets growing in the fall! But we did!), day lilies, and mint leaves.

Then we made two cakes (orange juice cake and angel food cake) and let Daisy and Goldie decorate one and Teddy and Junie decorate the other. They loved doing that!

Flower arrangements in a pumpkin

When I took a Floral Design class at BYU, one of my favorite assignments was when we had to create a flower arrangement in a pumpkin. I don't know why I liked it so much—it just seemed so interesting and fun! So I decided to try doing it with the kids during our Flower Unit. We just got floral foam, cut it into squares, and carved out the pumpkins to fit the foam inside! Then we went to Smith's and got several types of fall-colored flowers (I find Smith's always has the best selection if you want to create your own arrangement. A lot of other floral departments don't have greenery or filler flowers except in the arrangements they create) and after teaching them a few design principles, I just let the kids create!

There's a bit of mess and chaos to start with (we actually hollowed out the pumpkins on a different day so it wouldn't be so much all at once) but I loved the arrangements they came up with! We took them around to give to neighbors when we were done, and we enjoyed it so much, I think we might do it next year too! We ended up doing something similar around Valentine's Day (but without the pumpkins!).

The great thing about flower arranging, as my teacher always told us at BYU, is that you can't really go wrong! Everything looks pretty! That makes it very fulfilling because though you can improve and make MORE pleasing arrangements with practice, even your first clumsy attempts don't feel wasted.

Even Clementine helped!

My arrangement, displayed by Junie

Goldie's arrangement

Junie's arrangement

Teddy's arrangement

Daisy's arrangement

We even got a pretty vase for the table out of our leftover flowers!

So pretty!!

Honey tasting activity

It's always good to talk about bees! We had a whole unit on them once (Pinterest board for that here) and maybe will again sometime—there's lots to learn! But this was just part of our Flower Unit. Our honey-tasting activity was a favorite for everyone this time. We ordered a bunch of different honeys from Smiley Honey (they have a good selection of sampler sets here, or you can choose your own) and after tasting them all, enjoyed eating them on our toast for a long time afterwards (though not as long as you'd HOPE—it went fast!).

They were all good, but some favorites for their unique taste were the sourwood honey, the coriander honey, and the orange honey. But really, we liked them all! I like to order large bottles of the tupelo honey because it doesn't crystallize, or at least not very fast.

They can have very different colors as well as flavors!

We tasted each kind plain first—I went around and drizzled some into each child's spoon. The we got out the bread and had our favorites on that.

The little boys were glad to participate in this with us. Yum!

Making Paper Flowers

There are tons of paper flower tutorials online! This was the basic tutorial we used. It's not QUITE as easy as the video makes it seem (is it ever?) but it wasn't hard, and once the kids got the hang of it they had fun customizing their flowers and trying to make specific kinds. I love Goldie's dandelions, above, with even one of them that's gone to seed!

Daisy made a black-eyed Susan and some baby's breath.

They were teeeeeny! I don't know if you can tell how small.

She even put it on a real flower stem

Sometimes, as here, we forgot to round of the tips of the petals. It doesn't look as good.

Fun activity!

Flower Unit Study (II)

The very first homeschool unit we ever did was on Flowers! We've studied plants in lots of ways since then, with a unit on trees, a general botany unit, even honeybees. But it felt like a good time to come back to flowers. We talked about fruit and other parts of plants as well.

Click to enlarge!

Here's my Flowers and Plants Pinterest Board

We dissected flowers, which is always interesting

Talked about the Fibonacci sequence in nature

We visited our friend's beautiful yard—she loves gardening and knows a lot about flowers!

She also showed us inside her cool studio where she does flower illustrations, among other things

Her hydrangeas were huge!

We tried dyeing flowers, with…moderate success. This never turns out as dramatic as you'd like. I think TONS of food coloring is the way to go, but maybe flower shops that dye flowers have other tricks too.

We grew microgreens

And collected water through transpiration