If you’re growing sunflowers as part of our Sunflower School you’re going to want to make a sunflower height chart to track its progress. Will your sunflower grow taller than you?
How to grow sunflowers with children
Click here to download your copy of the Sunflower School curriculum and printables.
How to make a sunflower height chart
This sunflower height chart is a great accompaniment to our seed growing experiment, as it lets you track, record and compare heights.
To make it you will need:
:: white card
:: a roll of white paper or several large sheets
:: a ruler or tape measure
:: pencils, pens and crayons
:: scissors
:: sticky tape or tac
Start by drawing leaves on a piece of card – one leaf for each person in your family / class / group.
Colour the leaves in green and write the name of each person on a leaf.
Draw a tall stem up your roll of paper. Measure everyone, or have them stand next to the paper, and mark off how tall they are on the drawing of the sunflower stem. Place each person’s leaf at the correct height along your sunflower height chart, to mark how tall they are.
Who is the tallest person?
Who is the smallest?
What is the average height of your group?
How tall do you estimate your sunflower will grow?
Then measure your sunflower as it grows. You can collect your data in your Sunflower Journal (get your free copy here).
As your sunflower grows, mark how tall it is by colouring up the stem on your height chart. You can include the dates of your measurements alongside the stem. Keep colouring up, and up, and up, as your sunflower grows.
How many days does it take until the sunflower is taller than you?
Will it grow higher than the tallest person in your group?
Make a beautiful handprint sunflower to go on the top of your height chart as it’s crowning glory when your flower appears.
Sunflower School curriculum and printables
Click here to download your copy of the Sunflower School curriculum.
The Sunflower School curriculum matches a full programme of learning to the natural growing cycle of sunflowers.
It gives you six units of learning:
:: In the spring we’ll focus on planting and watching our plants grow.
:: In the summer we’ll learn about bees and pollination, and celebrate the gorgeous blooms through art.
:: In the late summer and early autumn we’ll turn our attention to harvesting, sustainability, and closing of the growing year.
Bonus sunflower printables
Our Sunflower School curriculum comes with 30 pages of bonus printables that you can use with your children to enrich their learning, including:
- My Sunflower Journal printable
- Lined, plain, and half-and-half journal pages
- Sunflower poems printable
- Sunflower sticker sheet
- Printable plant labels
- Sunflower counting mat
- Sunflower addition mat
- Sunflower subtraction mat
- Sunflower word mats
- Bee number cards
- Bee writing and scissor skills pages
- Garden Creatures page
- Honeycomb alphabet
- Printable seed packets
Click here to download the complete set of Sunflower School resources.
What a fab idea, I’m off to get some seeds!
How exciting to see them grow (both the sunflowers, and the kids)! 🙂
That is so cute. We just planted sunflower seeds last week. My son is so excited to see them already sprouting.
Hurrah piccies of some of our seedlings on my blog too 🙂 they seem to be very fast growers, i think mine will be be ready to plant out in another week or so!
I love this, can you believe that we only planted on Friday and we have lift off this morning!
Wow! Mini and Maxi must have very green fingers!
Wow! When seedlings pop their heads out it’s always so exciting. We haven’t yet manage to plant our sunflowers, but our beans, peas, sweetpeas, leeks and tomatoes are all loving this warm wet weather!
I love this time of year Zoe – all the growing just seems so positive.