Sunflower Unit Study with Book List and Notebook Pages

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Sunflowers are a fabulous plant to study “hands on” because they are so large that they can be easily observed at any stage. And because they bloom from mid-summer all the way through fall, you can use these books and ideas for some fun summer learning or as a great unit study for your homeschool!

 I hope that you’ll come to love sunflowers as much as I do. You can record their growth for math or study them in art. Possibilities abound!

Our FREE Sunflower notebook pages are geared more for upper elementary or middle school students, but they can easily be used with children as young as 3rd grade. As long as your children can write, they will be able to learn at their own levels and list details accordingly.

These Sunflower Notebook Pages include:

1. Fact Page on Sunflowers– This page focuses mostly on recording information learned.
2. Observation Page-Focuses on recording information through sketching and notes the growth of a sunflower.
3. Blank Page (black and white)– This is a black and white generic page that can be used for writing a story, letter, additional information, poem, sunflower garden plans, notes about the care of your sunflowers, or whatever else you’d like to record!
4. Blank Page (color)-This is another generic page for writing, but this one is in color!

Sunflower Book List

Below are some great picture books for enhancing your sunflower unit study! Most of these books can be enjoyed by any age- so if you are homeschooling multiple ages, you can find something for everybody below!

10 Sunflower Books

1. Sunflower House
2. From Seed to Sunflower (Lifecycles)
3. van Gogh and the Sunflowers (Anholt’s Artists Books for Children)
4. Camille and the Sunflowers
5. Sunflower (Life Cycles)
6. This Is the Sunflower
7. The Sunflower Parable: Special 10th Anniversary Edition (Parable Series)
8. The Three Sunflowers
9. Big Yellow Sunflower (Fold Out and Find Out)
10. The Gift of the Sun: A Tale from South Africa

Sunflower Unit Study Ideas and Activities

Math:

The Happy Housewife shared some great ideas for using sunflowers to study math! Your students can study estimation, measurement, charting/record keeping, graphing, and counting with sunflowers. Check out 5 Math Lessons Using Sunflowers.

Science:

There are some great YouTube videos showing sunflower seeds sprouting and sunflower seeds growing until they become flowers and start to produce their own seeds. I’ve included a few below, but you will be able to find many more if you’d like. These are fun to watch, and they make great science lessons too!

YouTube Videos:

Sunflower Seeds Germination and Growth Time Lapse

My Sunflower Timelapse: 15/3/10 – 24/7/10 – from Seed to Seed

Articles:

This article, Young Sunflowers Keep Time, explains how and why young sunflowers track the sun.

Another article, Why Do Sunflowers Always Face the Sun?, explains the same topic in a different way.

Sunflower Facts for Kids

Science activities or experiments:

9 Easy Sunflower Sprout Experiments is actually a pdf which shares 9 different ways to try to sprout sunflower seeds in order to compare the growth of the seeds in different environments.

Science Project: Reaping What We Sow: This is a science fair project for students of about 6th to 8th grades. It explores the relationship between seed size and plant size.

Art:

These Mixed Media Sunflowers art projects could be adapted to different age/grade levels. They look like lots of fun!

If your children love working with clay (or even play dough), they’ll love making these Sunflower Pinch Pots! Don’t worry if you don’t have access to a kiln. Just use bake-your-own clay or air-drying clay to make them instead.

This Sunflower mixed media lesson is different and produces a beautiful piece of art!

And of course you can always do something simple like look at some sunflowers (or pictures of sunflowers if you don’t have access to real ones) and draw, color, or paint them!

What activities would you add to make this sunflower study even more fun and educational? Do you grow sunflowers with your children? We would love to hear from you!