Flower Smashing Science

This was an activity we did in preparation of our upcoming Nature Adventure.  We have been learning about flowers and for this activity we learned about the parts of a flower.  First we went to the garden and picked some flowers.  These happen to be zinnias.  Then using a diagram of the parts of a flower, like this one at enchanted learning, we started to pull apart the flower looking for and identifying each part.

 Here you can see the petals, the stamen and on the stem is the pistil.

 After exploring the flower parts.  We then removed the petals from several different flowers and we created a design with them on a piece of paper.

 Then came the best part, we covered it with a second piece of paper and them hit it with a hammer.  Yep, science is fun!

 Eventually we realized it would work better if we used a thin piece of wood and then pounded on that.

What we were doing was pounding the pigment out of the flower petals, leaving behind beautiful designs.

Happy scientist!