Welcome to Day 4 of our preschool science series. Today Deborah Stewart from Teach Preschool is sharing a simple preschool experiment to do in class or at home. It would also make a nice Mother’s Day gift! Thank you Deborah for showcasing this flower observation activity.
This simple flower activity is a wonderful way to take a scientific yet colorful and easy to understand look at how a flower drinks up water from the root, through the stem, and up into the flower petals…
Each of my students selected a white carnation to observe. They began by cutting off the end of the stem so the water could flow through the stem and up to the top of the flower….
Then the children placed their flower into a jar of colored water (water with food color added). Each child chose the color they liked best and we talked about how the colored water will go up through the stem to feed the flower on top but because there is color in the water, we will see the color of the flower change too….
Each day the children came back to check on their flowers. The flowers began to change colors overnight. Some of the children wondered why their color wasn’t as deep or bright as some of the other colors of flowers. The children concluded that it was possibly because they didn’t add as much food color to their jar of water. And some of the children concluded that their flower just wasn’t as thirsty as the other flowers…
At the end of our week of observations, the children wrapped their flowers in a clear plastic bag and took them home to share the story of their colorful carnations with their mommies…
About Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed.
Deborah is an early childhood educator who has her own small private preschool and years of experience in all aspects of the field of early childhood education. Deborah shares about the experiences of her classroom as well as the observations she makes on early learning through her Teach Preschool blog. Deborah shares her experiences to help others, both at home and in the classroom, discover all the many ways young children can learn through rich, meaningful, hands-on exploration of their world.
www.teachpreschool.org
This is always a fun project– one of those that “doesn’t get old.” We like to do this with daffodills, too.
this is really fun if you carry it one step further and cut the stem down the middle- half of the stem goes in a tube of blue water and the other piece of stem goes in a yellow water tube- the result is 1/3 blue , 1/3 yellow and a stripe of green down the middle of the flower.
Interesting! We’ll have to try that! Thanks for sharing.
We did this with our class of three year olds last year. We talked about how the stem acted like a straw taking water and food(nutrients) up from the soil to feed the plant/flower. We did a living /no living unit back in Nov. after seeing your post about the book “Are You Living”, cannot wait to do spring/plants and connect it back to what we learned about living things. Living things grow, eat, breathe and move. I want to conduct an experiment with them to show how plants move to face the sun- have any good ideas?
We planted beans and then once they sprouted, we rotated the pot facing away from the window. We would observe over the next two days to see what happened (the plant would end up facing back toward the light).