Sun Seeking Plants (Grades K-1)

South Carolina Standards

These Standards can be found at http://www.myscschools.com/offices/cso.

Kindergarten

Life Science

Unit of Study: Animals and Plants

My Body

A. Characteristics of Organisms

B. 1. Organisms have basic needs.

C. a. Observe and describe how living things change as they grow.

D. b. Investigate and identify the natural resources (food, water, air) that living things need to survive.

B. Life Cycles of Organisms
1. Plants closely resemble their parents.
b. Observe and identify structures that are common between plants and their offspring.
c. Compare offspring of plants as similar but not identical to their parents and one another.

Grade 1

Life Science

Unit of Study: Plants

A. Characteristics of Organisms
1. Organisms have basic needs.
a. Investigate and explain that plants require air, water, nutrients, space, and light to survive and reproduce.

2. Plants have basic structures.

a. Identify the parts of a plant (seeds, roots, stems, leaves, flower, and fruit).
b. Classify edible plant parts as seeds, roots, etc.

Media Components

Video

How Plants Grow, Lesson 1: “The Sunflower.” Students get a close-up view of the life cycle of a sunflower. The video begins with the planting of seeds and continues all the way through to the harvest. Vocabulary and plant parts are explained throughout the video.

Web Sites

Nature Scene (Optional)
This site has loads of plants to check out. Visit this site to take a virtual field trip to a sunflower field if time allows.

http://www.helianthus.com/images/so3.jpg
This site provides an enlarged view of a sunflower plant.

Materials

Equipment

Prep for Teachers

Preview and cue the video to the beginning. Review the Focus for Media Interaction points in the Learning Activities.

Draw a large sunflower on butcher board paper. Be sure that the roots, stem/stalk, leaves, flower, and fruit are visible to the students. Write and cut out word cards of each plant part so they can be glued onto the picture.

Preview and bookmark this garden site:
http://www.helianthus.com/images/so3.jpg. Prior to teaching, open this page on your computer and use your AverKey to display it on your TV. When ready to do this Web activity, provide your students with a dry erase marker to label the parts of the sunflower plant that they see.

When using media, provide students with a Focus for Media Interaction, a specific task to complete and/or information to identify during or after viewing of video segments, Web sites, or other multimedia elements.

Introductory Activity

Step 1: Say: “Sunflower is the common seed name of the genus Helianthus. The sunflower is native to North America, and was used by early North American Indians for food and pressed to make hair oil. Meal from processed seed has been used for livestock feed. Today, whole seeds are used for oil, bird seed, and snacks. The seeds are a rich source of calcium plus 11 other minerals.

Step 2: Read aloud this riddle to your students:

“I am at the very first stage of life. I look nothing like what I will look like when I am all grown up. It’s possible that I can grow up indoors, outdoors, or both. It may take me just a few weeks to be all grown up or it could take many years. The amazing thing about me is that I can grow up far away from my parents and yet I will look exactly like them. What am I?”

Allow your students time to guess what you are talking about. (plants) As they learn more about plants, they will realize how each part of the riddle was being explained.

Step 3: Tell the students that they will be learning about plants over the next several weeks. More specifically, we will be learning about the sunflower.

Step 4: Take a picture walk through the book The Tiny Seed written by Eric Carle and then read the book to the students. Discuss with the students what they see happening to the tiny seed. Discuss the journey of the tiny seed as it passes though different areas and different climates and seasons. Discuss questions with the students such as: How does the seed change? What season provides the right requirements for the seed to grow into a small plant? What environmental conditions were right for the seed?

Step 5: Read page 15 of the book and discuss the basic needs of the sunflower plant to survive (air, sun, water, nutrients, space) with your students. (Note to Teacher: This page begins with the words “Now it is Spring.”)

Step 6: Ask the students what the word “sunflower” brings to mind and where they think the sunflower got its name. (sun)

Step 7: Ask the students how they think sunflower is spelled by stretching out the sounds. Write the word sunflower on the board and explain to the children that it is a compound word make up of two words (sun + flower). Review again the basic needs of a plant with the students.

Learning Activities

Step 1: Introduce the following vocabulary as parts of a plant:

Step 2: Further extend the vocabulary by explaining that a seedling is a small plant that is just beginning to grow and that a stalk is the main stem of a plant.

Step 3: Explain to the students that we will now watch a short video where the growth process of a sunflower plant has been sped up. Provide a Focus for Media Interaction by telling the students to look and listen for the basic needs of the plant.

Step 4: BEGIN playing the tape from the beginning. The title will be displayed along with the opening credits. This segment will continue until the seed begins to develop roots. PAUSE the video when you hear “the root grows for three days.”

Step 5: At this point, discuss with your students what they have seen and/or heard thus far about the basic needs of a sunflower plant. (Answer: soil—which is the space; water, air, minerals—which are the nutrients; and sun)

Step 6: Provide the students with a Focus for Media Interaction by telling them to listen for the parts of the plant. Press PLAY and continue watching the video until you hear “Above ground, two more leaves appear above the first two.” PAUSE now.

Step 7: Discuss with your students the parts of the plant which have developed so far. Label your class size plant picture at this point by adding the word (roots) at the base of the plant underground and by adding the word (leaves) beside the tiny green leaves on the chart. Discuss how important the roots are because they give the young plant a strong foundation. Discuss how the leaves are important because the first original leaves had food stored in them, but these new leaves will make food themselves by using the sunlight.

Step 8: Provide the students with a Focus for Media Interaction by telling them to listen for two more parts of the plant. Press PLAY and continue watching until you hear “the stalk is growing stronger.” PAUSE the video at this point and discuss the parts of the plant that we just learned about. (flower and stalk) Add the labels for both of these words to the picture as well.

Step 9: Provide the students with a Focus for Media Interaction by telling them to watch for an insect that will help the sunflower to grow.

Step 10: Press PLAY and continue watching the video as the sunflower starts to bloom. PAUSE the video when the bee arrives and you hear “the pollen helps the sunflower grow more seeds.” Check for comprehension by asking what insect will help the sunflower grow. (bee) Then discuss how the sun allows the seeds inside of the sunflower to grow. Also, discuss the important role insects play in helping plants grow more seeds.

Step 11: Provide the students with a Focus for Media Interaction by telling them to listen for different uses of sunflower seeds.

Step 12: Press PLAY and continue watching the video until you see a sunflower farm and you hear “good for animals on a farm.” PAUSE the video and with the students make a list on the board of all the uses of sunflowers that were just mentioned. (good to eat, cooking oil, pet food, food for farm animals)

Step 13: Provide the students with a Focus for Media Interaction by telling them that they will need to watch closely so they can estimate how many seeds they think may be in one sunflower plant.

Step 14: Press PLAY and continue watching the video until you see the farmer picking the seeds and hear “the time to pick them is now.” Label the picture with the words seed and fruit and discuss how in the case of the sunflower the seed is the fruit. Estimate how many seeds the students think grow on a sunflower plant. (Answer: 800-2000 seeds)

Step 15: Provide the students with a Focus for Media Interaction by telling them to listen closely to the number of seeds that a sunflower can produce. Press PLAY and continue watching until the end. Then, discuss how amazing it is that a small flower can produce 800 seeds and a large flower can produce around 2000 seeds. It truly is amazing that all these seeds can come from a plant that grew from just one seed.

Step 16: Using the AverKey with the computer and TV, display the sunflower image found at the Garden Web site at http://www.helianthus.com/images/so3.jpg. Provide students with a Focus for Media Interaction by asking for volunteers to label the parts of the sunflower plant with a dry erase marker. (Parts to be labeled include: leaves, stalk, flower, and fruit.)

Step 17: Bring this lesson to a close by reviewing the basic needs and the parts of a sunflower plant.

Cross-Curricular Extensions

Science: Have students plant sunflower seeds and maintain their growth using artificial sunlight if you are teaching this lesson out of the plant’s natural growing season.

Give each student 5 sunflower seeds and a clear plastic cup. Model for the students how to put a thin layer of gravel followed by potting soil into the cup. Each student will then place the 5 seeds into the cup pushing each one into the soil very gently, making sure at least one of the seeds is placed along the side of the cup. (Note to Teacher: This is so the root development can be viewed.) The student will add no more that ½ cup of water. The student will place the cup near a light source and observe its growth, watering as needed.

Music: Allow the children to listen to the song “Sunflower” sung by Raffi on his “Raffi Radio” CD. It is a slow descriptive song about the sunflower and how it grows. Then, have the children pretend to be a seed at the beginning of its growing cycle and grow as the song progresses. By the end of the song, all the students should be on their tip toes sunseeking!

Art: Introduce the book Camille and the Sunflowers written by Laurence Anholt and published by Barron’s Educational Series in 1994 to the children and explain that this story was based on the life of Vincent Van Gogh, who was a real artist who lived over 100 years ago in France. Explain that Van Gogh’s painting of sunflowers is probably the most famous of all sunflower paintings. Allow children to make drawings of the life cycle of sunflowers beginning with real seeds. Continue the stages by adding clouds, rain, and sun to show the basic needs of the plant.

Math: Obtain a ripe sunflower and allow the students time to estimate the number of seeds. Then, take out the seeds, group in tens and count.

Social Studies: Kansas is the “Sunflower State.” Find Kansas on a map of the United States. Other states that produce sunflowers are North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Colorado, Nebraska, Texas and California. Locate these states on a U.S. map as well.

Writing: Allow each student to keep a garden journal. Students can jot down notes about the growth and progress of their plants on a calendar. Students can make a collage using the empty seed packets, pictures from magazines or photos of their own plants, articles from magazines and newspapers, pictures from cards and then write captions underneath.

Community Connections

Take the students on a field trip to a local nursery to learn about plants and how they grow.

Related Web Sites

FLOWERscape, Voudette Inc., is a garden-planning software that aids in the planning of gardens using beautiful plant photographs at different stages of growth. A virtual flower garden appropriate for all ages can be seen at: http://www.fscape.com/

Related Literature

Sunflower House written by Eve Bunting (Sagebrush Educational Resources, 1999)

The Missing Sunflowers written by Maggie Stern (Greenwillow Books, 1997)

Wild Wild Sunflower Child Anna written by Nancy White Carlstrom (Simon & Schuster Children’s Books, 1991)

Student Materials