May 18, 2013

Botany~ Flowers

Stephanie Botany, Field Trips, Homeschooling, Learning with Play, Nature Walk, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Well this is it! I am officially here to let you know that our school year is over! Ok…for right now! 😉 I have grand plans for an ocean study before we head there on vaction, but for all intensive purposes we are all done! This week we wrapped up our botany lessons by talking about flowers! Honestly it was a really fun lesson and great way to end the year! Bunny loved it and so did Pup! We even threw in a field trip to the Botanical Gardens! Bunny really seemed to absorb all the information that she needed to. We started off by talking about the parts of a flower. I was so excited to have received a beautiful boquet of flowers for Mothers Day. It had Lilys, Crsanthimums, roses, and carnations. It was the perfect way to explore all different kinds of flowers. We started with lily since it is the perfect flower to see the all the parts. After we diseceted the flower, Pup matched the parts of the flower to the nomenclature cards. Bunny and I labled them and added the parts of the the pistil and the stamen. Bunny really like this and we ended up dissecting about 6 flowers! While Bunny was working on the flowers we were able to talk about the different kinds of flowers, like the compound flower and the perfect flower, since we were working with so many different varieties.

 

 

The next day, I pulled out some q-tips to tlk about pollination of flowers and what flowers are for! The idea came from here and the q-tip was colored yellow to represent the bee. We then moved the bee from flower to flower to show how the pollen needs to move from flower to flower. The girls loved this. We talked about how the pollen travels down the pistil to form a new seed. It was fun to “see” how this happened. I was able to go out to our garden and see the overy of the daffidols swollen up and the flower dead after it was pollonated. We also cut one open to see the seeds starting to form. Don’t you love it when the perfect learning materials are right where you need them?

We ended the study with a trip to the botanical gardens! There wasn’t too much in bloom yet since the bulbs are mostly done and the preneinals are just getting planted, but there was tons of great stuff to look at! We had some friends join us which always makes it more fun! 🙂

Here is our friend discovering a robin’s nest in the tree! There were eggs! We quickly left after that, but I did manage to grab a picture! 🙂

As you can see we had a great time! With their interest in the flowers we managed to cover quite a lot our Botany album in a very short amount of time. It was a really fun way to learn and play at the same time! Happy Schooling (and almost summer)! I linking up over at the Weekly Kids Co-Op, Virtual Montessori Fair, and The Ultimate Homeschool Link Up!

PS: As you can see, I am still having some issues working out the pictures! I promise to get it worked out soon! 🙂