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 bumble bees 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
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.
This work is great for fine motor 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.
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.
Check out our favorite books about sunflowers:
Ten Seedsby Ruth Brown
Katie and the Sunflowers
Sunflower House
From Seed to Sunflower
by Ruth Brown
by James Mayhew
by 
by Gerald Legg
Enjoy!
Marnie
