Investigate a flower's power of marketing by making an imitation flower that successfully signals a bee (or other pollinator of your choice) to visit. Try to determine what characteristics will attract a pollinator to your flower. Also available as an online game.

In this activity, learners learn about the adaptations that flowers have developed which support pollination. Learners also list their personal preferences (i.e. favorite color, food) and a partner will create a "designer flower" to match their preferences. Learners can participate in a Take-Home challenge, in which they will draw a fictional pollinator-plant pair.

This activity (on pages 24-29) combines science and art to introduce learners to how different animal pollinators spread pollen from one plant to another, and how certain shapes, colors, and smells of different flowers attract particular pollinators. In Part One, learners draw and label a flower based on a Pollinator Chart, then build the flower. In Part Two, learners survey others in their class or group to see if they can tell which kinds of pollinator their model flower would attract.

Watching plants grow is like watching paint dry: It happens so slowly that the changes are imperceptible from one moment to the next -- and yet the end results are dramatic. This video segment shows just how amazing plant development can be by depicting various phases of the process using time-lapse photography. Footage from NOVA: "The Shape of Things."

In this activity (on pages 9-14), learners dissect a real flower -- the kind of work botanists do. Learners discover where to find pollen, and learn about other flower parts including petals, pistil, and stamen. In the "What We Know" section at the beginning, learners are introduced to exactly what pollen is and why flowers need it. This could be a great activity for allergy season!

This activity (on pages 15-23) combines interactive role-playing and graphing to introduce learners to the health affects of pollen. In the first part, learners role-play a detective on a medical case and the main character in the case. Learners formulate a hypothesis about a patient's illness. In the second part, learners graph evidence based on pollen counts and create a "final report" about what caused the patient's health problem. This activity smoothly combines health education, environmental science, and math.

The purpose of this resource is to observe the flowering and leaf stages of selected garden plants throughout the year. After a phenological garden is planted, students observe the growth of leaves and blooming of flowers on the plants. These plants were selected because each plant blooms at a different time in the year.