Discovering Daffodils: Science Behind the Beauty

Year 5 and Year 6 this week took a botanical plunge to practice their surgical dissecting and anatomical recognition skills with spring daffodils.

Looking at the beautiful bounty of daffodils in bunches at the start, it was hard to believe what we were going to discover inside!

We started by carefully observing the flower as a whole – turning it in our hands to experience the different textures, colours and pay attention to any symmetry and scents.

Using a comparison of several different diagrams to appreciate the subtle differences in flower morphology, we navigated our way through petals, sepals, stigmas, styles and stamens to display them all attractively on our dissection mats.

We had to take care with the dissecting equipment and learn how to always keep the sharp ends in our sight so as to avoid any accidents – just like surgeons do. Also, like surgeons, we took precise measurements of the flower parts too and tabulated our results.

As we went along, we took photos and videos of the intricate process and are now editing ‘how to’ video guides from the footage to further develop our skills and reflect on the practice when we revise.

The Upper Prep School children really raised the bar with their surgical skills this week and, as you can see from the photographs, everyone achieved some fantastic results linking between the academic information we had learned earlier in class and the actual real-life functional parts.