Bulbs Powerful Little Teaching Tools

Author: Lisa Duchene

In Winnepeg, Manitoba, Laila Schwartz runs a children’s gardening club at Balmoral Hall School, a private girls’ school, and works in groups of 10 with girls ranging in grades from 1 to 5. Her October unit focuses on bulbs and each week she uses them to teach a different lesson across the curriculum. The well-designed tiny packages hold beauty and hope, and they have considerable power to teach science, history, art — and community — to children of all ages.

During the first week of the unit, the Schwartz and her groups of students cut up garlic and onion bulbs to observe bulb structure. The children read A Flower Grows by Ken Robbins, which shows pictures of amaryllis in various stages of growth. Then they use the cut bulbs as stamps, dipping them in paint and making pictures of flowers with them.

Once they’ve learned about bulb structure, and that a bulb should be placed pointy end up in its hole, students plant grape hyacinth bulbs in small plastic pots. They decorate paper lunch bags to cover the pots and glue instructions for forcing — including when to pull the pots out of cold storage — onto the bags.

Schwarz also reviews the history of tulip bulbs, telling her students that these bright spring flowers became popular in a movement called Tulipmania in 17th century Holland, and are now a multi-million-dollar industry, but that they originated as wildflowers in central Asia and were first cultivated in Turkey around 1000 A.D. She shows the class pictures of the tulip fields and reads The First Tulips in Holland, by Phyllis Krasilovsky.

In the final week of the unit, Schwartz and her students plant tulips and grape hyacinth bulbs in their school garden. Back inside, they write up information about how bulbs grow and how to plant bulbs, and they illustrate this information with bulb pictures. “I keep these sheets on hand to give to people who buy a bulb plant from the [plant] sale,” says Schwartz. “We use a different method of propagation and reproduction with each grade and in the spring we sell all the plants we’ve grown at a plant sale. The proceeds fund our club and help to green the schoolyard. We also donate some plants to community gardens in our urban area.”

Ready to dig in? Here are a few additional activities ideas:

• Focus on botany by dissecting tulip bulbs. Students will find a baby flower bud in the center and thick white “scales” around it to protect and nourish the flower bud. The knot on the rounded bottom of the bulb is the basal stem, which connects the flower, fleshy scales (or storage tissue), and roots of the plant. The bulb’s roots will grow into the soil to gather water and nutrients to feed the scales, flower bud, and the plant to come. (See the Journey North Website for a diagram.)
• Try chilling some bulbs in the refrigerator and others in the freezer for several weeks. What happens when a bulb freezes? (A tulip’s flower bud is very tender and must not freeze.) Why doesn’t a bulb freeze in the ground? (Soil temperatures are warmer than air temperatures; some bulbs are hardy, meaning they can handle some freezing and, if planted early enough, their roots can become established before the soil freezes. Also, the soil freezes gradually, not abruptly as in a freezer.) Download a free fact sheet from University of Minnesota Extension on forcing bulbs indoors.
• Force narcissus bulbs in clear glass containers filled with pebbles (set bulbs into pebbles and add water until the water level reaches just below the bulbs), so that kids can see what happens “underground” as the bulbs root and grow.
• Plant an amaryllis bulb and have kids keep a journal about the daily changes they observe.
• Now that students know how to plant bulbs “pointy end up,” find out what happens if you plant some properly and others upside down.
• To help young children remember which end is up, tell them to think of the bulb as a hat. (The word tulip comes from the Persian word toliban, meaning turban.) Have them try balancing a bulb on their head with the pointy end down; then try it with the wide end down. Which way works better?

For additional ways to use bulbs as teaching tools across the curriculum, check out Turn on Learning with Bulbs and Bulbs Across the Curriculum.

Lisa Duchene is an environmental writer and volunteer coordinator of the Bellefonte Community Children’s Garden in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.