Level 2: Flowers Unit Study

• The Treasure Hunter’s Handbook by Liza Gardner Walsh – If your family spends a lot of time outdoors exploring streams and ponds, this is an excellent resource you will use for years. For this lesson, pages 24-34 will be most helpful. (You can also find it on OpenLibrary here!)
• Sing a Song of Seasons edited by Fiona Waters – We reference this book of poetry often throughout our units because it provides one song for every day of the year. It’s a great staple to have in your homeschool library, especially if you’re a family that enjoys Tea + Poetry!

What better way to start off flowers week then by making your own arrangement to enjoy all week long? Here’s a brief video on how your child can create their own bouquet.

The best way to learn the parts of a flower is to hold one in your hand and dissect it. Use this video as your guide. Have a flower (preferably a lily or daffodil) for your child to dissect along with the educator in the video. (If you are working with more than one child, we suggest that each child have their own flower!) Download and print this lab sheet for your child to use as they identify each part.

(+) Once your child is familiar with all the parts of the flower, you can print the two downloads on rachelignotofskydesign.com created by the author of the What’s Inside a Flower? book. They’ve created a beautiful coloring page and a flower sheet that needs labeling which will make great copywork practice.

Reinforce the dissection (and also identify the stem, leaves, and roots) with this felt activity. Cut out the pieces in advance and have your child build the flower and identify the parts as they do. The blogger doesn’t include the pistil and stamens, but you should add those in, too.

We’ve been doing a lot of heavy mental work! Let’s get up and move a bit with this flower picking gross motor and listening activity. This activity can either be done inside using this printable or outside using real wild flowers. If you are working inside, prepare your space with obstacles for your child to go through. For example, place pillows on the floor, chairs gathered together for them to climb over, or a long piece of masking tape on the floor for them to carefully step on. If working outside, use the natural surroundings available to you in a playset or your backyard. Give your child verbal directions disguised in a story. Allow your imagination and their need for movement dictate the game.

Here’s a script to expand on: One day, a little boy/girl came to a field of flowers and decided to make a bouquet of wild flowers. He decided he wanted to gift the flowers to his mother, but she lived so far away. He placed the flowers in a vase (a toilet roll can be a good pretend vase) or wrapped them with string. In order to get to his mother’s house he must first climb a mountain (the chairs), then cross a river (pillows on the floor), and finally cross a bridge (the tape on the floor). Finally, he arrived at his mother’s home and presented his lovely flower bouquet to her. She was so grateful! She gave him lots of hugs and kisses in return.

Let’s start from the ground up—with roots! The roots and stem are both key parts of the flower that collect water and nutrients and carry it to the rest of the plant. Review the pages in What’s Inside a Flower? about the roots and stem. You can also read pages 8 and 9 of The Big Book of Blooms. Next, let’s demonstrate how the stem acts like a straw with this colorful experiment. Note: You’ll set up this experiment today, but it will take a few days to see full results.

The flower’s leaves have the very important job of making food for the plant (and, as a by-product, they make something important for us, too!). They do this through photosynthesis, the process where plants use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to produce glucose, or sugar. You can review this process in the What’s Inside a Flower? book on pages 15 and 16. Next, show how the leaf’s chloroplasts make food with this blogger’s demonstration. You can also show your child how leaves respire with this simple experiment.

Let’s “grow” some flowers of our own with this flowering number bonds activity. If this is a new concept for your child, start with the 1-10 bonds. Use the blank page to work your way up to 20. Do as many blooms as your child is interested in completing for now!

Let’s work on some sight words with this Flower Sight Word Game! Start by printing and laminating these pages. You may want to print onto cardstock for more durability. (If you are playing with more than two children, print more point garden collection cards on page 3.) Cut out the garden collection cards and the flowers on page 4. Next, tape the two pieces of the game board together to make a circle, like this:

Use a dry erase marker to write sight words that your child is working on on the flowers on the game board. You can find some ideas here, and be sure to review them before playing. (Don’t let that list stress you out! These are just ideas.) Next, use a die and any playing pieces you want to help your child work their way around the board. Whenever they get a sight word correct, they collect a flower piece to plant in their “garden.” The game ends when they are tired of playing or when they have read them all!

Pages 36 and 37 of our book talk about flower vines. Review the fun facts with your child, and then let vines inspire a little writing readiness with this printable activity. Give your child a green colored pencil and encourage them to trace each line, and then they can color in the flower at the top.

Another interesting flower we read about in The Big Book of Blooms is the cactus flower. Many people don’t think of cacti as being flowering plants, but they wouldn’t be able to make seeds without their blooms! Let’s read The Night Flower to learn about an amazing desert flower with a very long life cycle.

After reading, watch this time-lapse video of a real saguaro flower blooming. This video also shares some more information about the flowers of cacti. Finally, let’s make our own saguaro handprint craft!

Start by using green paint to have your child make a handprint on a piece of cardstock. (You can also let them paint the desert background, if desired!) Using their finger tip or a Q-tip, have them add “flowers” to their cactus. Once the paint is dry, use a thin black marker to add the cactus spines. If your child has sensor issues with paint, using a paint brush is fine!

Let’s review telling time with this flower powered activity.

Let’s bring Fibonacci’s work to life with this Fibonacci flower craft. We recommend you precut the circles before starting the lesson. Ask your child to measure each circle before building the flower. You can also explain the Fibonacci pattern briefly by doing simple addition on a white board.

A flower that perfectly illustrates Fibonacci’s swirl in nature is the sunflower. Sunflowers also inspired the word of another man, artist Vincent Van Gogh. Click here to watch a brief video about Vincent Van Gogh. Next, let’s look at one of the most famous flower paintings, “Sunflowers.”

The really amazing thing about this painting is that Vincent Van Gogh painted the whole thing in various shades of yellow—’and nothing else.’ He wanted to show the amount of depth an artist could put into a painting with just variations of a single color. In color theory, mixing a paint color with white (to make it lighter) is called a tint. Mixing a color with black (to make it darker) is called a shade. A tone is when an artist adds gray to a color to make it more muted. Let’s explore this idea with our own flower painting! Using “Sunflowers” as inspiration, have your child paint their own flower painting using just one color as the base and creating tints, shades, and tones of the color.

Growing sunflowers. Print out this page and discuss the life cycle of a sunflower. Grow your own sunflowers following these directions. This project can be observed over several days and weeks.

We’d love to see your sunflowers in the coming weeks if you replant them in a pot or the ground! If you post them, please tag us @learnandliveletter on Instagram!

Let’s practice literacy with this flower phonogram printable. We have provided you with two ready to use pages with phonograms Fl and S. You also have a blank flower to work on any phonogram you would like. Print out all the sheets in the download (and laminate for future use). You can use this activity in a few different ways.

Option 1: Cut out the peddles with the words written on them. Say each word and ask your child paste them to the flower with correct beginning phonogram in the center. They can also practice reading the words on the peddles of both flowers.
Option 2: Practice writing skills. Give your child the blank flower sheet with the empty peddles to write on. They can copy the words printed on the flowers with words. This activity will serve as copywork.
Option 3: Have a scavenger hunt. Ask your child to search the home for words that start with a specific phonogram. (+) Practice spelling by writing the items they found.

Before your flowers from the week start to wilt too much, let’s preserve them with a beautiful suncatcher craft. Start by picking off blooms and flowers that you want to display. (You could even add additional flowers that you might find outside!) Next, have your child arrange them inside of a laminating pocket as desired. When they are happy with the design, close the pocket and seal it in your laminator. Cut out a circle from the sealed pocket (or whatever shape your child wants), like this:

Use tape or string and a hole punch to hang it in your window to enjoy fresh blooms for weeks!

Flower pot wind chime.

Finally, let’s end the week with some Tea + Poetry! First, bake these edible flower shortbread cookies. If you purchased Sing a Song of Seasons, choose from any of the many poems about flowers in this book. If not, you can find some other flower poems to read together here.