Sunflower Day!

Today is the first day of fall.  During our morning meeting, I declared today "Sunflower Day" and we took a "field trip" outside of our school to harvest some of the sunflowers that the current second grade class planted at the end of their year in first grade.  We are trying to answer the question, "How do the parts of plants help them survive and grow?" in science.

This box is full of the sunflowers that we harvested from the gardens.

We examined every part of the plant with magnifying glasses.

We felt how heavy the sunflower was when it was filled with mature seeds. 

Image from http://thesnailofhappiness.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/imgp1508.jpg 

We observed that the buds of sunflowers track the sun.  Once the flower blooms, the sunflower no longer exhibits this behavior.  This is called heliotropism. Sunflowers do this so that they can receive the full impact of the sun, which helps them to grow very tall. 

We observed that the leaves of some sunflowers are huge!  The leaves in plants manufacture the food the plant needs to eat.  Large leaves help a plant survive and grow.

We also noticed that the stems of sunflowers are prickly.  The prickles discourage plant eating animals from climbing on them and eating them. 

Every child took home sunflower seeds of varying maturity that they discovered by pulling apart a sunflower.  We noticed that young sunflower seeds are white and flexible.  Sunflower seeds turn darker colors as they get older.  

There were lots of signs of squirrels in the sunflower gardens.  We noticed that some of the plants were missing the flowers and some of the plants were strewn all over the walkways.  We predicted that squirrels were eating the sunflowers in our garden.