For our science work the past couple of weeks we have been talking about flowers, plants, and photosynthesis. In order to help us we did some flower dying! Now we didn’t get the idea from this lesson plan, but it pretty much explains what we did. The only difference is that the one we used said to use one glass of colored water, and one glass of regular water. This seems to make it take longer for the whole flower to become colored *we’ll have to test that hypothesis at a later date to be sure*. The one big thing I would strongly recommend is that you hunt down carnations! 
Every mention of this experiment calls for white carnations, but we couldn’t get our hands on any. So instead we had to use white roses, and while they are pretty, they aren’t cheap, they lack the fullest of carnations, and their stems are a bit thinner than carnation stems so splitting them is a little more difficult. All and all it worked out really well and the boys loved seeing their favorite colors appear on their flowers. 
This week we are starting dinosaurs! Oh the fun we will have learning about those amazing creatures.
Here we have the two glasses and the split flower. I had to cut the flower shorter, and getting the right size for the glass was a pain. They still turned out great though. I used tape to keep the stem from splitting more.
The other flower required me to use tape to keep it from leaning out of the glass, along with a knife to weigh it down.
What they looked like before they changed colors!
January 24, 2011 at 11:44 AM
I love this and had completely forgotten how simple it is to do :) Thanks for the reminder. The flowers turned out really beautiful too!