Sunflowers

Today Mrs. Sarchet brought in two large sunflowers, one for each class.  The sunflower was as tall as 2 and a half students.
We read the story The Sunflower That Went Flop.  Then we wondered about our class sunflower.  We wondered if the stem was hollow.  So we broke the stem and looked inside.  It was full of white material called pith.  The outside of the stem was rough and the inside was squishy.  Some of the students took parts of the stem home.

Then we cut the leaves off of the stem and measured them.

We were very interested in the roots so we pulled all of the dirt off of the roots and really examined the roots.  The sunflower had so many roots.  Do you know why a sunflower needs roots?  We pulled the roots off and measured them.  We also looked at the roots under the document camera.





Then we looked at the sunflower head and pulled all of the seeds and the yellow petals off of it.  There was spongy white material under the seeds.  Some of us put seeds in ziploc bags to take home and some of us counted the seeds.  We had a great time pulling the sunflower head apart.

Thank you Mrs. Sarchet for bringing in sunflowers for us to examine.