A few children gathered at the mini-studio to work on partner observational drawings of sunflowers. The area had an arrangement of images of sunflowers and of fresh and decaying ones that invited children to cut, pluck, and examine their structure.
Teacher Jen: When you take a closer look at these sunflowers, what do you notice?
Remy: It’s bent and there’s little stuff there (from the side, spiky hair like fibers).
Teacher Jen: Hmmm…I wonder if your body was a sunflower, how could your body show this?
Grace and Remy bent their necks downward and lowered their heads.
Eliotte: I notice there are seeds in there (middle).
Remy: There is no seeds. That’s the dead sunflower.
Eliotte: They look very big (looking at the middle of the sunflower with the magnifying glass).
Grace takes a sunflower and lays it on the paper and traces the stem.
Eliotte takes a leaf and places it on the paper and begins to trace the outline.
Remy: I notice the veins (on the leaf Eliotte is tracing).
Aiden: Really deep inside there is something called nectar. I see lines!
Since the children made discoveries about the smaller details of the sunflowers, it might be helpful to meet again with our drawings and pictures in hand so they can reflect and share as a group what they had noticed individually. How might sharing this information support the communication necessary to create one big collaborative drawing of a sunflower? – Teacher Jennifer