Thursday, April 10, 2008

Flowers and Dirt and Butterflies, Oh My!

Well, I have no natural craft abilities whatsoever. I'm going to have to take lessons from Deneal. I love the thumbprint flowers, by the way. But I took the challenge upon myself to figure out fun learning activities for my children that pertain to our theme of the week, flowers. So, this is what we did:

Target has small flowerpots with seeds and dirt in their dollar section. (You take it home and plant it.) I let each of my children choose a flower, and we brought them home and planted the seeds. We talked about what flowers need in order to grow, and after we planted them we looked up information on each flower on the internet so we could learn about when their flowers would start sprouting and what they would look like full grown.

Patting the seeds into the wet soil








One boy chose a sunflower, and one chose zinnias









Next, we went to Reiman Gardens, a fantastic indoor and outdoor garden famous for its butterfly garden (and, therefore, has colorful flowers). We checked out all of the flowers, inside and out, and wrote down the names of the flowers we liked best.



Smelling flowers (and talking about which ones smell good, which ones stink, and which ones are the prettiest in their opinions)







Angel's Trumpet...the kids like these








Their favorite flower of all? This one, called anthurium.








We learned a lot, and had a lot of fun as well!

2 comments:

Ella said...

Hi, Thanks for the great flower ideas. I think I'm going to be a week behind you so I can use all of your ideas and plan for the next week. I hope that's not cheating. Thanks for the info on butcher. I also just found out that it is sold at some Costco's, so I think I'll check there first. I just wanted to add some links to some other flower craft ideas for young ones.

Handprint flowers:
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/flowers/handprintflower/

Flower Lei:
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/flowers/lei/

Tissue paper flowers:
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/flowers/tissueflower/

Flower Cupcakes:
http://jas.familyfun.go.com/recipefinder/display?id=50059

(P.S.- My husband used to be roommates with Desta Gillice's husband, so that's how I heard about the blog!)

Erin said...

Hi Ella, thank you so much for all of those links! I checked out every one and my kids can't wait to start (those hand flowers are genius, aren't they?).