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Have you ever tried writing poetry with children? So far this summer the Sunflower Club has inspired us with measurement, science, art, numbers and biology and today we’re tried out some poems about sunflowers.

We had a go with two different prompts. The first was to take each letter of the word ‘sunflower’ and see if we could find another word beginning with that letter which suited our flowers. This worked well for my 7 year old but didn’t click with my four year old.

For the second prompt we used some starter sentences to brainstorm ideas. For example…

A sunflower is….

The sunflower’s colour is…

A sunflower is tall like…

The petals are like…

We then took the ‘answers’ and combined them to make our poem.  Here’s what we came up with – what do you think?

Sunshine

Up to the sky

Nodding

Fiery

Lovely

Over our heads

Wonderful

Extremely tall

Radiant

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Bright, beautiful, radiant colour

Like a lion’s mane

Tall as a mountain, up to the sky

Happy and sunny and radiant

And don’t forget you are invitied to our Sunflower Club linky party on August 25th. If you have been growing sunflowers or doing any sunflower activities over the summer please come and share your ideas with us. Whether you’ve a tip for planting, advice for growing giants, sunflower pictures or crafts, please come and link up with us.

Happily shared with…

Regular readers will know we’ve been running a Sunflower Club over the last few months, with families around the world joining us growing sunflowers and having fun with lots of linked activities. I thought you might like to see how our own sunflowers are getting on.

Here’s one we grew:

And here’s one we made:

Now, I hear some of you have sunflowers that are, shall we say, a little vertically challenged? Fear not – with this handprint sunflower you can make it just as tall as you like!

Here’s how: have fun making lots of handprints, cut them out and then staple them around a paper plate. Scrunch up some black tissue paper (which is fantastic exercise for fine motor skills!) and glue into the centre.

We have one more Sunflower Club activity for you, coming up in the next week or so. Then, on Wednesday 25th August 2010 we would love to have a Sunflower Link-up Party. I’ll be revealing just how tall our sunflowers have grown (keeping our fingers crossed!) and my girls would *love* to see what sunflower activities you’ve been up to.

So mark Wednesday 25th August in your diaries and please come over to link up your posts and photos to the Sunflower Party.

This post is very happily shared with the Sticky Fingers Gallery, which this week is celebrating ‘Nature’.

and

A Vision to Remember

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Come and join our Sunflower Club for lots more sunflower fun.

The music on the slideshow is from the Album Frogs Legs by Various Artists Kazoomzoom

How are your sunflowers coming along? Ours went out in the garden a couple of weeks ago. The tallest one is up to 45cm on our sunflower height chart and  mostly they’re doing well – working their way up the wall but not yet taller than Little. One however has been munched. The girls were horrified! Who had done such a thing? Pulling some ivy off the wall this weekend we found our answer: 14 snails, sat biding their time, waiting for the feasting to begin.  I am such a hippy, harmony-promoting gardener that I can’t bring myself to squash them, so they are flung over the back wall (into an alleyway, not someone else’s garden!) – which of course only delays the munching.

Before the snails went for the high jump, we put them through their paces in a Snail Race.

On Your Marks....

This gave the girls the opportunity to look at the snails up close and ask lots of questions about their shells, slime and ‘sticky out bits’. Snail World had all the answers. We talked about our responsibilty to animals and both girls were very careful when handling the snails. One thing we did discover was that snails just don’t understand the concept of keeping in your own lane – so if you fancy trying this I’d suggest more of a ‘bull’s eye’ circular race track, starting all the snails in the centre and seeing which makes it to the circumference first.

Victory to Snail #1

What do you do when you find snails, or slugs, in your garden? Have you got any alternative solutions to stop them munching?

Our sunflowers have now moved outside to our little greenhouse to enjoy the Spring sunshine and get them used to being outside. We’ve been out enjoying the garden too. Little has been especially interested to see creatures out there. She will stop in her tracks and peer at her feet, watching an ant running around. Big is interested to know which animals are goodies (that would include worms and ladybirds) or badies (which definitely includes slugs and snails). So we have decided so survey what animals we have sharing our garden with us by playing… Garden Bingo!

First we talked about what animals we might expect to see. (Sorry Little, but no elephants are likely to be found.) Then we drew pictures of them. Everyone can join in with this, no matter how young or artisically challenged they might be. Little did a great worm, ladybird and spider – with carefully counted legs. Big’s cat is very characterful and her butterfly is perfectly symmetrical. I was able to muster some greenfly and wowed everyone with my woodpigeon.

Then we stuck our animal pictures on to our bingo card and wrote their names underneath, along with a tick box for each one. Each time we spot an animal in the garden we’re going to tick them off our card. Take time to have a good look at each animal as you see them. Look at their shape, colour and patterns and count their legs (or note their lack off). Talk about their role in the garden ecosystem and decide if they are goodies or badies.

If you like a competition you could make each person a slightly different bingo card to see who can spot all their creatures first to get a ‘full house’. We like to promote harmony in our garden so we have one big bingo card to complete all together.

If you’re out in the garden and growing things with your children, come and join in with our Sunflower Club to get a Spring and Summer full of activities all linked to growing and gardening.

Sunflower Club: We have lift off!

I can’t tell you how excited we were to discover our baby seedlings have popped their heads above the soil. Big and Little were dancing!  The plantlets are tiny at the moment but we have high hopes, and to monitor their progress we have made a Sunflower Height Chart.

We started by drawing a leaf for each member of the family, colouring them in and writing our names on them.

Then, using a roll of paper stuck to the side of the fridge, we drew a tall, tall sunflower stalk. We all stood against it to measure how tall we are, and used our leaf to mark our height. This gave us lots of chat about big, small, medium and so on. And about how children grow taller but grown-ups do not.

And then it was the sunflowers’ turn. Big measured them with a ruler and discovered they were 4cm tall already.

Over on the height chart we measured 4 cm up the stalk and coloured it in green. We’ll keep measuring and ‘growing’ our height chart stalk as the plants grow. Maybe the girls will grow over the Summer too. The children are especially excited about the sunflowers growing above their heads.  And as Daddy is 6’4” the little seedings have a lot to beat.

This is part of our Sunflower Club project - and it’s never to late to join. There’s still plenty of time to get planting. And if you do and you blog about it, please link up with the MckLinky so we can all see how you’re getting on. Pop over for a look now to see themadhouse’s great idea for using eggshell planters.

Today’s the day – we planted our Sunflower Club seeds! Sunflowers are hardy annuals so you can plant them straight outside from March onwards. We learnt last year however that slugs just love to much straight through juicy, new sunflower stems, felling all your plants and leaving you nothing to grow, so this time we’re starting them off indoors. If you haven’t planted yours yet there’s plenty of time to get them started. Here’s what we did:

We stared off by having a good look at the seeds and drawing them. We’re making a scrapbook to record all our sunflower fun so we recorded today’s date and Big wrote a diary entry to say we’d planted the seeds. We stuck the seed packet in and our seed drawings. Using the scrapbook will give us the opportunity to do lots of writing and drawing and will be a complete story of our growing, from seed through to tall flowers -hopefully!

Then we explored the soil. I asked the girls what it felt like and they said it was crumbly, warm, brown, messy, soft and tickly. We used a spoon to fill the seed tray with the compost – great hand-eye co-ordination practice for Little, who did a geat job and only spilt a bit.

We then put one seed in each cell – counting the seeds as we went along.

We wrote labels so we know what kinds of seeds we’d planted (we’re growing tomatoes and marigolds too). It’s great to let even very young children have a try at writing – you can see from the photo how Big and Little wrote their labels. For Little it’s good for her to try out holding a pencil and ‘writing’ and lovely to see she understands that the marks she’s making have a purpose.

But, what do seeds need to grow? Big thinks they need soil, water and sunshine. Little thinks they might need worms too.  We decided to conduct an experiment to find out for sure what they need. Most of the seeds are in compost, on the windowsill and have been watered. We put a couple of the seeds in a dark cupboard to see if they’ll grow without light. A couple more are in compost by the window but we’re not giving them any water. And a couple more are on the windowsill in a glass of water, but no compost. We wonder what will happen to them all? They should germinate in 7-14 days so we’ll let you know.

Are you growing sunflowers too? If you’re blogging about them, please link up with the Linky below so we can all come and see how you’re getting on. And help yourself to the Sunflower Club button (on the left-hand column) to add to your blog page. If  you haven’t got a blog we’d love you to leave a comment here or on the facebook page.

Happy planting!