Flowers

We are having a fun time this year looking at plants. The boys have become well aquainted with the word botany and now they use it easily. When asked what they were doing in school they said they were doing this and that but they loved BOTANY!  When we began this year it was a brand new word, now it is a good friend.

We have begun, but not yet completed, the leaves of the plant. To organize our study we have been looking at the plant from the bottom up. Since the leaves came before the flower we did what we could with leaves at that time. Much of the fun of leaves, however, is to look at them in real life. To take your leaf identification card out and see what you find that matches it. The see the different shapes, colors and sizes. The different edges, and arrangements on the stem. Well in our neck of the woods there havn't been a whole lot of leaves out yet, so we are postpone part of our study until they are thriving. We went on to flowers while we wait for nature to make us some leave to look at.

To begin with and to tie into our seed lesson we read through much of the book called Little Wanderers. It is mainly about how seeds travel but there is whole lot of great description of the flower the seeds come from and the plant itself. It can be found here for free, bought here from Yesterday's Classics. As I read through the book, boys with itchy fingers colored or did copywork, or drew. Here are some samples of their work on the dandelion. One of their personal favorites.

Dandelion coloring page by Zak

Parts of the Dandelion page by Max

Copywork page about the Dandelion by TJ

We learned from our reading that the dandelion got its name from it's jagged leaves which look like lions teeth.

Drawing of a Dandelion by Max.

He loved the idea that the young leaves were delicious in salads and very healthy to eat.

Flowers that we read about we looked for their sticker in our Usborne Nature Sticker Book.

Then I went out and found four different kinds of flowers to disect. We got out our parts of a plant diagram we had just done and cut away. It really is amazing how many different ways God has designed the same  parts.

Parts of a flower diagram by TJ

Parts of the flower pop-up diagram.

 Parts of the flower montessori cards.

Parts of the flower "go pick a flower" game. (go fish)

We add into our lapbook a mini book on phototropism.

Cover by Max

Inside by Max.

 Lastly we made a few flowers from paper and talked about their parts.

The most interesting and important function of the flower, pollination, we have not forgotten. We will be looking at that aspect of botany through the eyes of the bees and the butterflies for the next 8 weeks before we wrap up this year with the trees and leaves.

Though we did not have time to fit it in yet, I made this copywork notebook from Elizabeth Gordon's vintage book The Flower Children. It is availabe for sale at Currclick.