Flowers

We spent near enough all day yesterday in the garden, making the most of the lovely warm weather. The children enjoyed running, hopping, jumping and trying to skip up and down the garden as well as playing on the slide and the swings. Then time spent building sandcastles, playing with the dolls and play food. They were also fascinated with the different size daffodils we had, we talked about the different parts of the flower and they could see lots of pollen. I found a good picture showing some of the flower parts

and a more detailed drawing for M.

Seeing their interest yesterday, I thought we would pop into the florist after toddlers to get some white carnations to dye, some tulips and find another flower with obvious stamen that we could take apart and they could see all the parts and compare them. We were so lucky when I asked if they had some carnations and tulips, explaining what they needed them for, she came back with those and a large bunch of flowers, apparently they were all going over so couldn't be used in any of their bouquets etc but we were welcome to them.

So our first experiment was to show how water travels up the plant stem to the petals. I filled a small glass with water and added a lot of blue food colouring and then waited.

After half an hour you could already see that the dyed water had travelled up the stem to the petals.

An hour later the flowers were dyed a lovely blue, even if I do say it myself

 

and a few hours later even darker blue. 

 We also looked at the tulips and took one apart, looking at the petals, stamen, carpel and pollen. They lined up the petals and stamen and counted them.

 They then enjoyed making patterns and people with the petals etc, this led to much make believe and story telling.