Living Root Garden School • Plants & How They Grow • Name: ______________________
🔍 The Case
The case of the flower that turned into a fruit — a blossom lost its petals and swelled into something you can eat. What happened in between?
Petals are the billboard: big, bright, and impossible for a passing bee to ignore, often scented too. Under them sit the sepals, small green leaf-like bodyguards that wrapped the bud like a jacket before it opened.
The stamen is the pollen factory. Its dusty tip is the anther, where pollen grains are made, and its thin stalk is the filament, the flagpole holding the anther up where a visitor will brush against it.
The pistil is the receiver. Its sticky tip is the stigma, which grabs pollen like flypaper; its neck is the style, the hallway pollen tubes grow down; and its swollen base is the ovary, which holds the ovules — and becomes the fruit.
Rule out the lookalikes: a sunflower is not one flower at all — it is hundreds of tiny flowers pretending to be one, ray florets around the edge doing the showing off and disk florets in the middle doing the reproducing. And a small green boring flower is probably wind-pollinated, with no petals, no nectar, and no scent, because the wind needs no advertising.
Ask: If you take a flower apart, will you find the part that becomes the fruit hiding at the bottom — and which part holds the pollen? Write your guess before you pull it apart.
Try: Take one flower apart gently, petal by petal, and lay the pieces out in order. Find the dusty anthers and the sticky stigma, then press the pieces in a heavy book.
Stretch (Teens & Growers ready for more): Follow one flower to fruit: photograph it every few days and journal the change as the petals fall and the ovary swells.
Tell: Fill in the log below — date, what flower, what you found inside — then finish this sentence in words or a labeled drawing: “The fruit came from the ___ because ___.”
Date
What I saw
What surprised me
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
🛠️ Build It
Draw your dissected flower with every part labeled — petals, stamens, pistil — like a treasure map.
🗣️ Be the Teacher
Show someone a flower and tell them how pollen gets from one flower to another, and what the flower becomes — in your own words.
🏅 I can…
☐ I can name the parts of a flower.
Portfolio check
☐ Guide read
☐ Case solved
☐ Ask, Try, Tell done
☐ Build It filed: Pressed flower + labeled parts
☐ Taught someone
☐ Badge earned: I can name the parts of a flower.
Living Root Garden School • livingrootgarden.com/homeschool/ • Free — print as many copies as you like. File this sheet with your portfolio log. Sprouts do the Read, the Case, and Build It; Growers try the Ask, Try, Tell stretch when ready; Teens do the whole packet — including teaching it back.