Parts of a Flower

A large close-up of one flower fills the middle of this 3rd grade page, opened out so the inside shows: long petals, dark-tipped stamens around a central pistil and green sepals at the base, all on a stem. A small inset on the right shows the plant it comes from, stem and leaves with no roots drawn, and the flower circled, so children can see where the close-up comes from. Four numbered tags point to parts: 1 a sepal, 2 a stamen, 3 the pistil and 4 a petal. A bank at the top holds five words, the four flower parts and roots, and four numbered lines wait below. The child writes each part's name and crosses out the word that is not a part of a flower.

The flower is where a plant makes its seeds, and naming the pistil and stamen is the vocabulary children need before they can talk about pollination. Roots is the intruder in the bank, a real plant part that belongs to a different diagram, so crossing it out checks that children know where the flower ends. With four tags and four flower words, the bank leaves no spare flower word to guess with: a child who mixes up the pistil and a stamen will find two words fighting for one line.

One sheet, four parts, one word crossed out. This page sits above the kindergarten to grade 2 range of the rest of the plants family; flower structure usually arrives in grade 3 or 4, and in NGSS it belongs with 4-LS1-1. A real tulip or lily cut in half lets children find every part with a magnifying glass. The base diagram and the functions face are the right pages to do first.