Preschool STEAM Station: Pounding Colors

Last week we began our Orchard Harvest unit from Mother Goose Time, and it had an awesome 

STEAM Station involving flowers.  STEAM stations are learning stations that revolve around Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, or Math.  In this case, the STEAM station is focused mainly on Science, but I would also say Art. 

So last week, my 10 month old son decided he was not going to nap and after I took all the screaming I could handle, I decided the 3 of us were going to take a field trip and get some homeschooling done in the great outdoors (and hopefully wear him down for another nap).

We have a beautiful demonstration garden where we live.  Master gardeners take care of the space and it is for anyone to come out and enjoy. It was the perfect place to obtain a variety of flowers for our Steam Station. Unfortunately, I only shot the picture below which obviously doesn't show you the beauty of our garden...ugh.  I wish I had taken more pictures.  I wish I had more hands.
But I was enjoying just the moment with my kids and being completely present with them.

In the garden, we found a wide variety of flowers in all sorts of colors and we even came across a crab apple tree!  I love the texture of the crab apple... so interesting.   We tried to get one of each flower we found and placed in our basket to bring home for our experiment.  When we got home, and brother went down for another nap, Avaleigh and I headed to the garage to do our flower crushing.

 We placed the flowers on white paper towels, placed a layer of paper towels on top, and I taped the corners down to help.  We found one of Avaleigh's play hammers from a Melissa & Doug kit.  Then she got busy hammering away at the flowers.  It was so exciting to see the colors bleed onto the

 paper towels.  She really had to hammer hard and continuously to get a rich color.

We used white paper towels, but this would look great on some muslim or white fabric.  I just didn't have any on hand.  We did 2 different sets of the poundings.  The purple flowers and leaves were the richest in color, and it was so neat to see how much pigment was in such a small delicate flower.  Avaleigh's favorite flower was the one that looks like a spider in the 2nd picture below.

Can you even imagine that this is how they dyed yarns and fabrics a few centuries ago?
Can you imagine all the flowers and leaves it would take to make a purple robe?
Soooo many things we take for granted today that were such luxuries not that long ago.

My girl loved this experiment (along with myself) and I would have never thought to do something like this.  I am so grateful for our MGT curriculum.
I just wish I had done it on some fabric so I could frame it.  I might still frame it- the jury is still out on that.  I am so grateful that my boy napped for a little while so I could enjoy some mommy and me science with my girl.


What's one of your favorite flower experiments?


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