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Fine Motor Activity with Sunflowers

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This post introduces a wonderful fine motor activity with sunflowers.

harvesting_sunflower_seeds

Oh, the joy of watching our sunflowers grow this summer! My boys planted these tiny seeds and watched their sunflowers grow to over seven feet tall. We watched the bumblebees and the honey bees drink nectar and cover their bodies with pollen. Happy to help them on their journey. This fine motor activity takes the learning with sunflowers a step further.

Fine Motor Activity with Sunflowers

red_sunflower_2

We saw the plant sprout, blossom and bloom. Now we are witnessing the plant coming to an end of its life for this year. We talked about how sunflowers dry up and are able to reproduce for the coming year. Today we did a fine motor activity with the sunflowers.

sunflower

This work is great for fine motor skill with the older children in your classroom. ALL YOU NEED is a tray, a sunflower heads that has dried out, tweezers and a small bowl for the seeds. The children love taking home a packet of seeds and parents love hearing about the extraction.

sunflower_work

Be sure to “wipe away” the layer above the seeds. Children enjoy this process too. If you were to truly harvest the seeds, you would want to follow more careful instructions about drying the head, cutting the head off, etc. If the sunflower were “truly” ready to be harvest, you could simply brush them off the head. In this case, we want to children to pluck the seeds out with tweezers so we’re actually using a head that is dry but probably not optimal for planting. With that said, you never know and we should always encourage children’s sense of awe and wonder.

Related Read: Fun & Easy to Do Preschool Activities with Flowers – Parts of a Flower

Check out our favorite books about sunflowers:

Ten Seeds by Ruth Brown
Katie and the Sunflowers by James Mayhew
Sunflower House by Eve Bunting
From Seed to Sunflower by Gerald Legg

Enjoy!
Marnie

About Marnie Craycroft

Marnie hails from Maine where she spent summers buried in sand and winters buried in snow. She is the daughter of a nearly four decade veteran of the public school systems. Teaching has always been a part of her life. She founded Carrots Are Orange in 2010.

Carrots Are Orange is a Montessori learning and living website for parents and teachers.

Marnie graduated from Wesleyan University in 1999 with a BA in Economics. She spent nearly a decade working in investment management. In 2006, she earned her MA in business from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

Marnie moved to the west coast in 1999 and currently lives in Boulder with her husband and three sons. She is Montessori trained. Her work has been featured on Apartment Therapy, Buzzfeed, PBS Kids, BabyCenter, the Melissa & Doug blog, Huffington Post, and WhattoExpect.com. Besides writing, passions include running (usually after her three sons), photography, and outdoor adventures.

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