Deconstructing Sunflowers for STEM Discovery
“Would it be okay if I took this sunflower apart?" asks Mia, pointing to a vase of week-old cut flowers. "It's kind of droopy anyway."
“Sure," I respond, remembering that Mia is our "Concoction Queen" with a penchant for creating potions packed with flower petals.
"Are you going to make another one of your magic potions?” I ask.
“Hmmm, maybe," Mia muses. "But right now I want to see what's underneath all of those little flowers in the middle of the sunflower.”
This is what I love most about working with the same group of children over the course of weeks, months and years: I get to observe how their accumulated knowledge changes the way that they interact with the world!
During a field trip last summer, our gang of engineering explorers discovered that sunflowers are considered "composite flowers" because their dark, fuzzy centers are composed of about 2,000 teeny tiny flowers that eventually become sunflower seeds.
Today—a full year later—Mia is deepening her understanding of the life cycle of a sunflower: A seed becomes a plant, which makes a flower, which makes more seeds.
Armed with this knowledge, the four-year-old studies the sunflower's structure to see how its stem, petals and seeds work together as an interrelated system—in much the same way that engineers analyze a variety of complex systems.
But Mia's STEM investigation has just begun. Sunflower in hand, she sits down at one of our outdoor tables and begins to snap off parts of the stem.
I grab a pair of scissors and a pair of tweezers, along with some bowls and a magnifying glass, and slide these investigative tools onto the table to support Mia's scientific endeavor.
But Mia is so engrossed in her study of the sunflower's structure that she barely notices. I sit back and observe as she picks off the green leaves and stacks them in a neat pile before plucking off the flower petals.
While deconstructing the sunflower's stem, she notices that parts of the stem are hollow.
"These little tubes in the stem are like straws," she observes. "So I think the stem of the sunflower helps it grow tall by sucking up water from the roots all the way to the top parts of the plant . . . " She pauses to reflect on her hypothesis. "Yes, that makes sense!”
Mia's innate curiosity is fueling this child-led investigation which, in turn, is fostering the development of her observation and critical-thinking skills as she gains a basic understanding of scientific principles.
Mia uses the scissors to cut through the center of the flower. When the scissors get stuck halfway through her stem dissection, she uses her problem-solving skills to devise a different approach, using her thumbs and index fingers to pry the rest of the stem open and reveal its inner structure.
Seeds spill out as she works—and she leans forward to peer at the tiny seed fragments in different stages of decay.
Mia picks up a magnifying glass to study the seeds more closely. As she peers through the magnifying glass, the urge to take these loose sunflower parts and transform them into something else hits her hard and fast.
In the blink of an eye, she is off and running to the sand and rain garden table to begin her transformation investigation!
Mia is our resident poster child for the transformation schema, one of a series of schemas (or patterns of repeated behavior) that drive children's play-based learning. Schemas help children experiment, problem-solve, and develop new skills and understandings.
If you're interested in learning more about play schemas, check out Growing Kind's blog post, "What are play schemas and why do they matter?" or My Teaching Cupboard's blog post, "A Guide to Play Schemas in Early Childhood Education."
But let's get back to Mia's transformation schema! As you might have guessed, this play schema is all about change and how objects or materials can be transformed through various activities or processes. Children are drawn to this schema because they love to explore what will happen if they combine different materials, if their actions can be undone, and how much control they might have over the transformation process.
Transformation-schema-driven play can be as simple as mixing paints together to get a different color or mixing sand and water to make sand sculptures.
Mia loves playing with water and mixing different materials and substances together to see if they change in shape, color or consistency. She loves to investigate cause and effect—just like a chemist in a science lab—as she estimates, predicts, measures, and problem-solves her way through play.
As Mia hurries over to the sandbox—her tiny fists clutching loose-part petals and seeds—the other children pick up on her excitement. Her breathless enthusiasm conveys that she has a wonderful, magical, crazy-good idea that promises to be a lot of fun!
In a matter of minutes, our outdoor tables are overflowing with pots, bowls and buckets of water, as well as every natural loose part that these young change agents can get their hands on.
I see the flower petals that sparked Mia's latest exercise in transformation along with an ever-growing stash of flower heads, stems, leaves, seeds, acorns, walnuts, seedpods, and more.
This quick shift in direction and energy reminds me that this is how a child’s brain functions. When inspiration strikes, children can shift their focus in a surprisingly fast, fluid and intentional way.
The engineering process looks very different in children than in adults.
Adults follow a deliberate sequence of engineering steps:
- Ask
- Imagine
- Plan
- Create
- Improve
By contrast, children tend to merge these steps together and are very likely to create what they have imagined, with no other specific goal in mind.
Engineering often begins with curiosity and exploration, so let nature's cycles inform your STEM curriculum.
As the flowers in your garden begin to wilt or go to seed at the end of the summer, schedule a flower deconstruction session. Encourage the children to explore the intricate systems that Mother Nature has engineered to ensure that her beautiful flowers will sprout, grow, nourish native wildlife, and produce seeds again next year.
No garden? Transform the wilting cut flowers from the vase on your table into learning tools! Add them to your child's loose-parts play and watch the magic of the transformation schema and child-led learning begin!