Australia's Science Forum

I was wondering if anyone else is doing flower dissections and where do you get your flowers from without it costing a bomb, and what type of flowers do you try to get.
We are doing the dissections at the moment, and I had to buy some flowers this morning from coles (with my coles card ), they were $15 a bunch, and I dont have anywhere near enough for a class
Any ideas, advice is muchly appreciated
Lisa

Hi Lisa
have a look arounf the school maybe you could cut some from the gardens

We usally bring in what is in bloom at that time. Each teacher plus me, bring what we can, we have never in the 8 years purchased flowers for dissections.

Iris are good when in season.

Even weeds have been picked before now for dissection, yellow flower, danelong sorry some thing like that.

Thanks Labbie & Noona, funny thing is our bio teacher had a tree covered in these flowers that would have been ideal but all the rain destroyed them. I have looked around where I live and the school grounds, and there is only bottle brushes and gum blossoms (very high up), too hard for the kids to do and nothing else is in flower, really the wrong time of year

Lisa

yeah - just whatever we can source from staff / me.

The teacher who requested it had a shocked look on her face when i said that she could bring some flowers in.....and i would bring in what i had (some pruple things lassiandra? sp?) and they were great.
Hibiscuss are the best apparently.

Also have some daisys growing around here that I snipped...but it is the wrong time of the year isn't it!

We have never bought flowers either. Just what we can scrounge. The teacher who walks to school, has even resorted to flogging a few on the way. The simpler the flower the better, apparently. I only have gerberas growing pretty much all year, and they aren't ideal, it seems.

we use hibiscus which are in flower now, at least in WA they are. My neighbour has a few that hang over my fence so I just help myself in the morning and bring them in.

Look up previous discussion Flowers for Dissection.
Yes wrong time of year. Push for Sprin
Rosalie (another one)

I made a couple of visits (i.e. in person) to the two flower wholesalers in town and they gave me their "rejects". Since we want to look at the guts of the flowers, and don't care if the petals are wrecked, it was fine. We wrote a little Thank You note and everybody was happy!

Apart from that, we run around and flog the hibiscus from the bushes in our grounds, but that can be a very dangerous occupation, especially if the H.N.I.C. catches us!

I usually send an email around to all school staff begging for flowers from their gardens. I am usually very lucky and have some very generous staff.
Daffodils are usually the flower of choice (as you can tell by this we usually do the dissections in spring)

We just finished our disections yesterday. We use hibiscus that the teacher bought in from home. They were perfect, although a little worse for wear for the cold weather. (Yes, we think it is cold at the moment in North Queensland! It was 6 degrees last night! 26 degrees today however!) Hibiscus are great because you can easily identify all the parts.

Hibiscus is the preferred flower around here and fortunately there are some growing in a sheltered garden, so have flowers most of the year. Avoid any daisy type flowers - they are a composite flower, what you look at is actually hundreds of tiny flowers in the middle. The "petals" on a daisy aren't actually petals but sepals surrounding the flower head. They might be a challenge for some students. The simpler the flower the better - hibiscus are large and easy to see, magnolias would be good. Bottlebrushes (Callistemons) aren't as complex as you may think, just a bit smaller and need a microscope or magnifying glass. Could be good for a comparison if time permits.

I always scrounge around my garden at home and the one here at work.

I can't see why we can't ALL insist that the school HAS to buy the flowers in,

and get TWO bouquets of flowers - one for classes and......


wait for it








ONE for US!

Dream on Sunray!

You just don't want to admit that you'd like a bunch of flowers too!

What prac uses chocolates

the other bunch of flowers for the office staff - cause you all know they work SO hard and deserve to be thanked

[quote]What prac uses chocolates[quote]

Well actually...I did a really neat one using white chocolate and dark, graphing their cooling times. It was so cool! One cooled on a curve and the other in a straight line - repeatedly! So it wasn't just a fluke. I used EZ-Temp probes and graphing calculators, and we heated the chocolate in beakers on a low hotplate. Once melted we nominated a temperature, from memory about 65-70 degrees C, and then graphed their cooling.

Now while I couldn't eat that chocolate, I did get to eat the leftovers. I mean...who knew they weren't going to use the other block!