How to Teach about Reproduction with a Flower Dissection

Teaching about reproduction can be a lot of fun but also fraught, for obvious reasons. One way to approach it is to literally teach about the birds and the bees. Dissect flowers to teach students about flower reproductive parts and how the pollen mixes with the eggs to produce a new organism, with unique DNA. This is sexual reproduction! You can compare this to asexual reproduction in plants as well.

Getting Started with Flower Dissection

Many students love doing dissections. Dissecting a flower is especially great because students are more comfortable dissecting a plant than an animal. Which flower is best for a flower dissection? Some flowers are better than others. The following are best choices to dissect a flower since the reproductive parts are easy to see. Plus, every flower in this list has both male and female reproductive parts.

Which Flowers are Best for Flower Dissection?

Not all flowers work well for this project. Below, you'll find the list of flowers I recommend.

• Lily
• Alstroemeria, also called Peruvian Lily
• Tulip
• Petunia
• Gladiolus
• Hibiscus
• Daffodil
• Carnation
• Evening primrose

Where to Get the Flowers for Your Flower Dissection Experiment

A great place to get flowers for a flower dissection lab is to ask your local florist if they can save old flowers for you. Florists often throw away aging flowers and those can be perfect for your students. You can also ask students to bring in flowers.

Looking for a Flower Dissection Resource?

Looking for a prepared lab experiment to do your flower dissection in class? This one has instructions, a worksheet for students to fill out and all answers are included. It’s simple and easy and your students will love it.

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Prepare students to do the flower dissection or follow up the activity by having them make a popup flower and labeling the parts. This is super fun, easy and results in a WOW flower card that students can either glue into an interactive notebook or use as a FANTASTIC Mother’s Day card — or an all-occasion card.

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If you are looking for a hilarious reading passage about flower reproduction, look no further:

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There’s also a funny slide presentation about how flowers reproduce:

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Want to show a movie about human reproduction? I recommend the PBS movie Life’s Greatest Miracle. It has amazing cinematography. I have found that I often need to pause it during class to answer student’s questions. Be prepared for a lot of excitement (OK, screaming and yelling) at the end when you see the baby’s head emerging at birth!

If you want to talk to students about contraception, this site is helpful because it has images of them. You can demonstrate how to use a condom by putting one on a banana. Students absolutely love that lesson.

It’s important to give students space to ask questions about sex education. This is a helpful resource to see the types of questions students might ask:

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This is a super fun unit to teach because students are fascinated with the topic!