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

Jerusalem Unit Study

We started out the year with a mini-unit on Jerusalem. We'd learned about Ancient Civilizations the year before and I just wanted to finish out, very briefly, our knowledge about what happened in the Middle East after the fall of Greece and Rome. We were going to finish our unit with watching the "Jerusalem" IMAX movie (which is very good; I've seen it before and loved it)—but the place we were going to watch it actually cancelled their showings and closed the movie a week earlier than their website said, so that was disappointing. We had fun learning a little about modern Israel and eating some Israeli foods, though!

 

Linked Together

 

I have seen and liked other peoples' ideas of back-to-school dinners in the past. But I've never felt a desire to do our own. Until this year! Suddenly I wanted to. Maybe it was the fact that it was Seb's last year of school…or I felt an urging to reset some expectations…I'm not sure what it was. But I thought of some words of wisdom to share (ha ha) to go along with the theme of Linked Together—something I've been really wanting for our family lately. For us to help each other. Be a team. When one rejoices, we all rejoice; when one suffers, we all suffer. And that's what I built our dinner around. (The words of wisdom were little heeded, and in fact barely listened to, I'm sorry to say—but I made the attempt, anyway.)

We had fun decorating! The girls helped me blow up these funny chain balloons, and make colorful paper chains.

Each and every member of the family was happy to be there.

Daisy and Junie wanted to dress up, so they did!

Linked together. Vegetable and chicken kebabs. It kind of fits!

And we had the best chicken souvlaki and grilled vegetables with tzatziki and whipped feta dip for dinner!