How Plants Use Colour: Animal Attraction

Once again we headed off into the forest to explore colour. The children have noticed before that there is a lot of green and brown in the forest. They have noticed the many shades of green and that it is easy to camouflage yourself in within these shades.

This time unlike camouflage we looked for colours that popped out! The first thing we noticed were the pink salmonberry blossoms peeking out at us from the layers of green.


 We stop to wonder why a flower would want to be seen?
Augustine: “Maybe it’s poisonous and warning us.” 

This led to a discussion about how some plants in the forest are poisonous and some are edible and it is always important to ask an adult before eating anything from the forest.

Many parts of the salmonberry plant are edible so we decided to each taste a petal from a flower, we also tasted a tender young shoot. We harvested with respect for the forest, only taking enough for a taste each.







We returned to our original question about why flowers would be bright coloured. Using bright coloured bandanas some of the children turned into colourful flowers along the trail, while the other children became bees, butterflies and other pollinators who buzzed from flower to flower.


















After this game we went to the meadow to harvest buttercups for a flower pounding activity.

Flower Pounding


Back at Creative Minds, using buttercups, salmonberry petals and some pansies from the flower box, Cedar group explored the question of how to get the colour out of the flowers.

The flowers were placed on a piece of thick paper and parchment paper was placed on top.

We tried rubbing, rolling and pounding, with wooden tree branch blocks but that didn’t get much pigment out of the flowers. Then we tried rocks. Rocks definitely worked the best.




When taking the parchment paper off the children were excited about the results.


Taiyo: “They’re smooshed!”


Jake: “The pink turned to purple!”
Jayden: “The purple turned blue!”

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