We’ve decided to concentrate on herbs and flowers for the duration of the summer for our home school days. The girls have all been really into making “fairy soup” and “flower brews” and I thought it would be a fun way to introduce local flora into our days as well as show them how some flowers and herbs can produce beautiful colors on fabric through dyeing and real edible concoctions too. We started with an easy herb- the Dandelion.
We learned about the parts of the Dandelion, sang a song, read a story about Dandelions and went out foraging for them in the neighborhood. The girls really enjoyed finding them all over neighbors yards and in cracks in the sidewalk. The foraged dandelions we used as sketching tools and then for use in our Dandelion solar dye. I bought edible (non-pesticide) dandelion greens for the girls to try. Most of them did not like the bitterness, but some didn’t mind when it was dipped in salad dressing. We also all had Dandelion tea and all the girls seemed to enjoy that. We sketched and painted the dandelions and then when all of us were ready to go home, we took Dandelion crown photos just for fun. (Some of the girls continued on with their dandelion study at home- Ellie spent some time really focused on painting a dandelion. Tyler wanted to re-create her dandelion crown with felt). It was a really nice morning of dandelion fun. (We’re going to let our solar dandelion brew sit for a week and then we will come back to it next week to finish the dye process).