Use chrysanthemums to teach children how plants use water. Fill clear vases with water and add a few drops of food coloring to the dye. Show your students a bouquet of white chrysanthemums and ask them to predict what will happen when you place them in the colored water. Set the bouquet in the water and encourage children to observe the changes that occur in the flowers over a period of a few days. Each day, the flowers will become a darker shade of the color that is in the water. Have them draw pictures to illustrate the changes. Invite children to share the reasons why they think the flowers changed colors and explain to them that the water travels up the stems of the flowers and feeds the blooms. Because you dyed the water, the dye traveled up the stems as well, changing the color of the flowers.
Teach your students about haiku poetry while engaging a chrysanthemum unit. Explain to children that haiku are traditional Japanese poems made up of 17 syllables. The first line contains five syllables, the second line contains seven syllables, and the third line contains another five syllables. Inform them that these poems are typically based on nature and because chrysanthemums are a part of nature, they are an ideal subject for haiku. Encourage children to write their own haiku poems and, perhaps, illustrate them. Invite students to share their completed poems with the class.
Include a craft activity in your study of chrysanthemums. Provide children with pieces of fall-colored tissue paper and instruct them to cut out five circles from the paper. Have them stack the circles on top of one another and use a hole puncher to punch a hole in the center of the pile of circles. Secure the circles together by pushing a paper fastener through the hole in the center of the circles. Instruct children to cut slits around the perimeter of the circles. To create the look of a chrysanthemum, they should pull the circles up around the paper fastener and scrunch them.
You can also use chrysanthemums to teach second-graders math skills. Provide children with small bouquets of different colored chrysanthemums. Discuss fractions with your students and provide them with the definition of the numerator and denominator. Have children count the total number of flowers in their bouquets. Explain to them that this number represents the denominator. Ask them to count the number of a specific colored flower in their bouquets and explain that this number represents a numerator. For example, if children have 10 flowers in total and three of them are yellow, 3/10 of the flowers are yellow.