Little Scientists: Flowers

Little Scientists is absolutely one of my favorite programs! It's for 2-5 year olds and lasts about 30 minutes. This month, we investigated flowers:

First, we read Plant the Tiny Seed by Christie Matheson. This was perfect for this program- short enough for the attention spans of the age group but still showed parts of flowers and things flowers need to grow. After the story, we broke up into stations:

We always have a take-home experiment (usually an activity that would not be possible to complete in our 30 minute program). This month, kids all got a cup with a stem of Queen Anne's Lace and water dyed with liquid watercolor. I filled the cups right before the program started so that the flowers were still white when kids got there and they were encouraged to guess what would happen to the flower and observe changes over the next few days. The internet told me any white flower would work for this, but Queen Anne's Lace was fabulous- the colors showed up easily and quickly.

Building a flower- kids used roots, stems, leaves, and petals to "build" a flower.

To practice visual discrimination, we played an insects vs. flowers game. I though this would be most interesting to the younger attendees, but even the 4 and 5 year olds liked this one. I found this printable on Teachers Pay Teachers here.

Color matching game

Flower counting station- kids had the option of choosing an easier activity (counting petals on a flower up to 10) or a harder activity (practicing tens tables up to 20). Kids who were able ended up doing both.

I didn't take a picture, but we also used snap cubes to measure some flowers and compare sizes.

Parts-to-whole matching activity- this one was also a big hit. Kids tried matching a picture of a flower with a close up picture of a part of the flower. This one was also from Teachers Pay Teachers here.

We do a craft most sessions, and this one was a big hit. Kids used flowers (cut out using our die cutter) and beads to make "flower power" necklaces. They were encourage to make a pattern with the colored flowers or talk about the colors they used, but they could  really do whatever they wanted. Sometimes that's the most fun craft of all!