Measuring Sunflower Heads and Counting the Seeds

There is a measuring strand in our Everyday Math curriculum.  In science today, we decided to do some measuring.  To connect what we are learning to real life, we measured some sunflowers.  Here are the sunflower heads that came from our garden.  (The background is a black trash can liner.)

There were a lot of sunflowers in the garden!

First, I divided the children into pairs.  Each pair chose a sunflower head to measure and recorded their results.

Here are two children measuring their sunflower.  Most of the sunflower heads were 4 or 5 inches wide.

Next we counted the seeds of one of the sunflower heads.

 

 

This is the sunflower that we counted the seeds from.

We put ten seeds in each cup.

These are the cups with 10 seeds in each cup.

Then we counted the seeds by tens.

There were 731 seeds.  That's 7 stacks of ten cups, one stack of 3 cups, and one tiny seed!