We are extremely lucky that we live just a few minutes drive from a wonderful farm which has pick your own fruit, vegetables and flowers over the warmer months of the year.  The kids love it there.  We have been going for a few years now and every time we go I am always interested to see how much they learn.  Sometimes you only realize that they have learnt something new when they start asking new questions a few days later and other times the questions arise while we are in the fields picking.

This past week we went specifically to pick sunflowers – my daughter had heard one of the farm employees mention that the sunflowers were ready for picking on a previous visit and had been asking ever since.  While we were picking the sunflowers both kids noticed all the bees just sitting on the sunflowers.  The bees were so busy “working” that they totally ignored the kids and the kids actually ended up getting really close to them and watched them for ages.

And the questions started, were the bees collecting pollen or nectar ?  what is different between the pollen and the nectar ? what happens when the bees flies to another flower ? when do the seeds come from etc etc

We got home and my oldest was immediately in her bookcase looking for books to read and then both kids dug out their magnifying glasses and had a really good close-up look at the center of the flowers (our flowers never made it into a vase, they were examined and dissected by the kids instead).

My daughter was asking more and more questions about the different parts of the flower so I printed out The parts of a Plant labelling and Reference Sheets (free from Twinkl) for her.  I slipped the parts of a flower page into a plastic sleeve for her and the parts of a plant into a plastic sleeve for my youngest.  My daughter had a great time examining the flowers and trying to see if she could find which parts of her flower matched the parts in the diagram (we had also picked some Dahlias at the farm).

My daughter then wanted to try to label her own diagram.  The Parts of a plant labelling and reference sheets from Twinkl include a reference page for a flower and a plant as well as the matching labelling pages (see pics below).  This was very helpful for us as it was the first time that my daughter has been interested in this type of detail about flowers so there were lots of new words for her (and some which I needed reminding about).

We also downloaded the free  Parts of a plant visual aid

and the free Part of a Flower visual aid.

And the kids asked if they could stick both in the back of their life cycle book (I know their this is not really life cycle stuff but the kids wanted it in their life-cycle book and I want their life cycle book to be theirs, one that they can add whenever they want).

I love that all of this was a result of us having a fun morning picking a few flowers. What started off as a trip to our local farm ended up being a great introduction to the parts of a flower.

Don’t forget to have a look at our page which lists the other Free resources that we have used   – Free Printouts

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