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!!

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

Botany Unit Study and Lesson Plan

Click to enlarge

I think this was our longest unit this year. Have I mentioned that this was a strange year? It was really different for us because for the first time we had lots of things going on outside of our "Family School." The older boys had classes once a week at a co-op, plus some extra sports (and Abe turned 1 and got a job!), the girls were doing swimming and gymnastics with money from an online charter school, and all of the children had extra technology and science classes that weren't completely put together by me! It was fun to have some variety, but a little sad to give up some of the time together that we've loved. I guess that's what happens as the children grow up! 

Anyway, we kept our family school units going twice a week, so everything took a little longer to get through, but we still had a good time. Here are some links we found useful:

Flowers and plants Pinterest board

I found myself suddenly interested in bulbs. Here is a good summary of the difference between bulbs, tubers, rhizomes, and corms. And here's another good explanation of what bulbs are.

We made the prettiest bracelets out of juniper berries—which are really the soft cones of juniper trees!

Have you wondered the difference between cedars and junipers? Now you can know!

We have the lovely Utah Juniper all over in our area. (And of course the lovely Juniper Lark lives in our house, ha ha.)

The kids had a surprising amount of fun with this activity, even though I thought it would be too young for them!

I want to do this activity in the Fall

Here is a photosynthesis video, and here's another. It was hard finding good ones! This one was pretty good, though.

Venus flytrap in action

Simple explanations of transpiration and capillary action

Our very first unit was on Flowers! It seems so long ago.

We had a Tree Unit several years ago, too.

I liked Marigold's plant cell drawing!

We looked at plant cells through a microscope.

Here we have 6 molecules of CO2 and 6 molecules of H2O…

Which are re-organized into a huge glucose molecule (C6-H12-O6) and 6 molecules of O2!

We loved modeling photosynthesis and cellular respiration! It makes it so much clearer when you can see the components actually being reused in different molecules. This is the basic idea, but we used marshmallows instead.

One day we tasted foods that come from all parts of a plant.

Peppers=fruit

Bananas=fruit

Carrot=root

Onion=bulb

Peas=seeds

Radish greens=leaves

Asparagus=flowers and stems

This project never works the way I want it to. Maybe I don't use enough food coloring in the water.

You can see a liiiiiittle blue in the petals, though.

We started a bunch of seeds indoors because it was too cold outside. I've never done that before, but it was fun. Malachi used them for his herb garden project, for one of his classes at the co-op we're part of.

Here are instructions for making a terrarium. We loved making these! I used assorted containers I found at the thrift store for a dollar or two. And they instantly made the house look so green and vibrant! I am not used to having many plants around (inside, anyway).

The best part of these terrariums (terraria?) was putting little tiny animals in them!

We have this little microgreens planter and we love it! Microgreens are just baby vegetables. They are a little more mature than sprouts (which are just barely-sprouted seeds), and they have tiny new leaves rather than just the first cotyledons, but you can use any kind of seeds to grow them. I think these were broccoli and radish greens. Or maybe mustard? Or maybe basil? I can't quite remember. We have tried lots of kinds! They all taste a little different. This batch grew really fast—they had sprouted by the second day!

You harvest the microgreens just by clipping them with scissors. We ate this batch on grilled cheese sandwiches and they were SO GOOD. We also like them in scrambled eggs. Or sprinkled on pasta. Yum!