Seeds – looking at and saving flower seeds

Some of our flowers are ripening their seed heads.  Most of these flowers are great self seeders but it is still nice to save seeds to sew where you want them and that you are getting flowers for free. I thought it would to interesting to show Luath.

Welsh poppies grow in many gardens here and they can be quite weed like, however their yellow petals brighten the day.

I showed Luath unripe seeds inside a green seed head and also the black ready to sow ones in a brown ripe head.
 
After quite some searching I think this flower is Centaurea triumfettii (Squarrose Knapweed) and sounds as if it shouldn't like our windy, sea salted, wet location.
 
It has soft feathering blow in the breeze seeds.
  
We have a few different coloured Aquilegia, seemingly they often change colours.  The bees love them.

These seeds are still green but are different as you break each pod to see them.  Luath thought they were like pea pods.
 
Some of the seeds we found we directly sowed into the ground.  We have also placed some stalks or seed heads of each flower (although aquilegia are best sown immediately) in the shed to make sure they are dry and then will store in a paper bag. 
(Luath is 29 months)

Amaryllis – a flower that grows fast and tall.

Most Christmases someone within our family is given an amaryllis.  They are lovely plants that produce beautiful big blooms.  They grow fast and tall which makes them perfect for toddlers or impatient gardeners.  Most bulbs come pre potted so all you need to do is remove from the box and add water.  For Luath we were simply caring for the plant, watching and measuring it’s growth.  I forgot to take a picture when we started.  It wasn’t long until we measured the height with five blocks.

Within a week it had increased to almost eight blocks.

It continued to grow rapidly and reached over 15 blocks – it was getting difficult to balance the blocks.  A second shoot had appeared and grew faster than the first.
 
We had a lot of colourful blooms that lasted for weeks on the kitchen windowsill.
 
(Luath is 26 months)

Simple Science – Colour Changing Flowers

I have seen this quite a few times online and it was on our to do one day list.  When I spied white tulips in the reduced section I thought perfect.  The idea is to show flowers uptake of water.

I lined up four glasses and half filled with water.  We added either yellow, red and blue food colouring to three of the glasses and left the fourth with no colouring. I gave the colouring a good mix and then topped up with water.  We cut about 2 inches off the bottom of each tulip and then placed a tulip in each of the glasses.  I attempted to cut the remaining tulip stems in half so the flower could be split between two colours, however tulips are not easy to cut so this part of the experiment didn’t work too well. 

The blue food colouring is powerful paste and it worked very quickly, within an hour the tulip was already slightly blue.

By the next day it was bluer still.  When Luath told daddy to come look at the flowers he said “oh I didn’t know you could buy blue tulips”.

The red and yellow took a little longer to show.  The blue flower is stunning but the leaves on that tulip have also turned blue which looks a bit yuk, however it does really show where the water travels too.
 
This is an easy experiment with pretty instant results if you use strong food colouring.  Next time we do this we will repeat with stems we can cut in half.

Luath likes that the flowers changed colours and she could also see that they were drinking the water as the water level had gone down from being at the glass rim.
(Luath is 25 months)
 
Shared with Tuesday tots via Rainy Day mum

(tiny) tot school - Nursery Rhyme - Fluraichean is rosan



Luath is 15 months



Flùraichean is ròsan

A h-uile duine còmhla

A-tuisiu, a-tuisiu

A h-uile duine sios

Tha sinne air an ùrlar

Tha sinne air an ùrlar

Tha sinne air an ùrlar

Ach leumaidh sinne suas

This week I picked a Scottish Gaelic nursery rhyme, it is a bit like ring a ring a roses, can listen and download here.  I selected a flower theme as the bluebells in the woods have just come out and are looking stunning. The only problem was that we have very little flower things to work with.

We sang and acted out the song.

Our books were very loosely based on flowers/gardens.

We spotted flowers and blooms while out for our walks.

We made flower shapes

 

We did lots of activities with milk bottle tops - working on sorting by colour (on/off success with this), picking the same colour as I held up (again on/off success), stacking, making into shakers (the dog loved this!). throwing them into a basket.

We also had out some lego style blocks and enjoyed making castles.  Luath's baby had fun being the king of the castle and humpty dumpty.

Craft
I made some playdough dyed with carrot and then butternut squash.
Music
we listened and danced to the waltz of the flowers from the nutcracker (we listen to music free here - might only be available in UK and Ireland)
Other things this week
we went for a sensory touching leaves walk

Had a sensory cooking experience

Find out what others were up to this week at 1+1+1=1

some flower resource pack links

http://3dinosaurs.com/wordpress/index.php/free-mini-flower-pack/

http://www.2teachingmommies.com/2012/03/flower-unit-expanded.html

http://homeschoolcreations.com/gardenpreschoolpack.html