Sunflowers in Bloom

Taller than last week!

Sunflower Growth Check

Our sunflowers are finally about to bloom!

They've definitely grown taller this week!

Weekly Sunflower Growth Check

The kids are home, but fortunately the sunflowers are the only ones that grew mightily in one week!

Growing Plants: Growing Kids

I took this picture of Chloe right before we left to take the kids to their grandparent's house for a week. I'll take the picture again when they get home. My guess is that both Chloe and the plants will look bigger!

Sunflowers Through Nature and Art

This school year, I decided we needed to have nature study time and more art time. The kids love this kind of learning, and I discovered a couple of blogs that have inspired me in my new endeavor. Friday I decided to combine nature study with art to go along with the sunflowers we've been growing all summer. The sunflowers are getting heavy with seeds, so I thought this would be the perfect time to dissect one of the flowers. Barb at the Handbook of Nature Study has a sunflower Outdoor Hour challenge listed on her sidebar that I reviewed before getting started.

The kids and I discovered all kinds of things about God's creation as we studied the rays of the flower, it's florets, and the growing seeds underneath the florets in the disk of the flower.

We then studied Van Gogh's painting of sunflowers online and completed an art project that I found on Kathy Barbro's blog. Check out her blog, Art Projects for Kids, if you are looking for some great art ideas to do with kids.

Allison's drawing

Abby's and Chloe's drawing

Mom's and Grant's drawing

Autumn Beauty Bloom

We didn't know sunflowers could come in any other color other than yellow. We are enjoying our Autumn Beauty sunflowers.

Growing and Blooming

We haven't measured our plants yet, but we think some of them are nearing 7 feet tall!

And, we have our first bloom!

Sunflower Lapbook

If you don't know what a lapbook is, google it, and you'll find lots of information on lapbooking. Lapbooks are all the rage in education right now, and homeschoolers especially seem to love them. I have generally avoided incorporating them into our day because of the work and time that they take. Chloe, however, cannot get enough of coloring, cutting, and pasting. She cuts up every sheet of paper she sees and sticks it to something. If she isn't cutting paper, she's stapling it or clipping it together with paper clips. (Mmm... I think I figured out why my paper clip stash is diminishing.) Clearly, she has a need to do things with her hands! So, I have succumbed to the world of lapbooking---for Chloe.

This is the front of her lapbook on Sunflowers.

On the inside she has 2 simple flap books, lifecycle of the sunflower cards, sunflower coloring pages, and a color sheet of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers". She begged me to cut out her pictures, so they would look just right in her book.

Almost Ready to Bloom

For the last few days we have been finding buds on our sunflower plants, and we are pretty excited about the promise of a soon to be bloom.

Meanwhile, the plants seem to be growing taller every day.

Bigger and Bigger!

When the kids got home from Nana and Poppa's house, they were surprised to see how much more the sunflowers had grown in just one week!

Even Bigger!

We are amazed at how fast our sunflower plants are growing. We did a little research and found out that not only is the state flower of Kansas the sunflower, but also the national flower of Russia is the sunflower!

Growing Big!

We were surprised by how tall our sunflower plants grew while we were gone last week.

They Came Up!

One of my favorite books to read to the kids when they were really little was The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss. The little boy in the story plants carrot seeds, but everyone he knows keeps telling him "They won't come up." By the end of the story, the little boy has grown the biggest carrot anyone has ever seen. We feel like the little boy in that story when he says, "They came up!" Our Mammoth sunflowers are sprouting like crazy. About three of our Evening Suns have sprouted as well. We are still anxiously waiting on the Autumn Beauties to sprout.

Sunflower Books

Chloe and I have been reading lots of books about sunflowers while we water our seeds and wait for them to sprout. Below are some of the books we have enjoyed.

Sunflowers

This week, we decided to plant our sunflower seeds.

We bought the seeds and some garden gloves a few weeks ago.

Chloe was very excited to start picking weeds. We were not prepared for the painful problem of goat heads that we encountered, however.

Daddy helped Chloe get rid of the goat heads and put down new soil. We planted our seeds and are now praying for the seeds to sprout!