Flowers are Amazing!

Thank's to Joshua for the title of this post.

For science this week we learned about flowers.

Our first activity was to dissect tulips, which were graciously donated by neighbors. My tulips died weeks and weeks ago, but that is another story. We found the petals, the stamen, pistols, stigma, and even some ovules. We talked about how if the pollen cane get onto the stigma, it will creep down into the pistol and turn the ovules into seeds and then in turn the seeds may become flowers themselves. This brought up the whole concept of pollination and bees, bugs, etc., why flowers smell and have colors, and about how the fruit grows. Each little apple blossom, if pollinated, is making way for a new apple full of new seeds! Here are the photos.

A Pistol

here you can see where the blossom fell off and the ovules are growing into seeds deep inside what will someday be a delicious pear!!

This is the picture we used as our dissection guide.

She had to make one of just petals.

All of Joshua's creations. Even a sword made out of flowers. He is still a boy, of course.

Our second flower project was to create our own ideal flower gardens (this was not academically challenging but it was artistic and fun to do). We have a bunch of gardening and seed catalogs so we just took some scissors and glue to them and made our creative creations. Abigail said she wanted to paint too, so we got out some paints as well.  I even made one too. Mine is what I am eventually going to plant around our front tree and outside the front bedroom window where the shade makes it almost impossible to grow anything else - even tulips and daffodils it seems.

And then I planted marigolds in my garden! I've never done this before, but everyone else does it so I figure it's important. Many people think it helps keep away certain bugs, but a couple of websites said it doesn't. Unfortunately, nobody is claiming it keeps ALL the bugs away, which would be wonderful. My gardening know how come essentially from just copying everybody else, so if you see me cutting a roast in half...

You can't really see, but there are marigolds planted between the mounds.

Derek too the day off of work on Friday and we went on a little hike above our old neighborhood in Springville. I was surprised at the many wildflowers there were up there, so I made the kids pay attention to them and called it a field trip.

And last but not least, our biggest healthiest tomato plant blossomed! We've got two little flowers on this plant and it makes me so happy because this is one of the plants we started from seed in our kitchen. I feel like a success!