We had 3 focus questions to guide our learning. They were:
- Since plants can't go off and find a mate, where / how do we get new plants?
- How do flowers attract bees?
- How does flower pollen get to where it needs to go?
We began our morning establishing some background knowledge on bees, pollen, and the structure of a flower. Next we headed outside to collect some flowers. We were quite lucky and gathered quite the collection! We had a picture guide to help us identify the flowers that we found. There were some flowers we were unsure about, but later discovered an iPhone app to help us (there really is an app for everything!). Some of the flowers we found were trillium and "jack-in-the-pulpit" (both of which we did not pick), cowslips, calla lillies, trout lilly, dandelions, wild violet, apple blossoms, strawberry blossoms, wild violets, spotted knapweed, and bearded iris. Wow!!
We took notes on the flowers, thinking about what attracted bees to these flowers. We then "dissected" them and examined the different parts. We learned that some flowers had both male and female parts, while others had one or the other.
We concluded our morning outside with a relay race to simulate bee pollination.
In the afternoon the Vermont Institute of Natural Science (VINS) did a presentation on reptiles and amphibians. He got to see a frog, and then see AND touch a snake and turtle!