Studying flowers and plants is an ideal way to address National Science Education Standards for life science in grades K-4. Elementary children enjoy observing changes in seeds as they germinate and grow into tall healthy plants, but how do you create an exciting and innovative study of flowers for your students? New technologies have the potential of making the investigation of flowers an exciting event.

In this activity students explore flower structures using a the QX5 digital microscope. Students will make observations using the microscope to formulate their ideas of the function of each part and take snapshots of their structures to create a pictorial library of flowers and analyze similarities and differences in flower structures of several species.

Grades 4-10