Frangipani Petal Counting

Frangipani has five petals. Almost always.

That almost is where the lesson lives. Count enough flowers and a child finds a four or a six, and the discovery that nature has a usual number but not a guaranteed one is a real and slightly startling idea at four years old.

We collect fallen flowers rather than picking, which also teaches that the ground is a legitimate source of material.

The page has the counting frame, a tally for the group's findings, and a prompt for the moment an odd one turns up. Our record over a term was three four petalled flowers out of about two hundred, and the child who found the first one talked about it for weeks. If your site has no frangipani, hibiscus works and is also reliably five.