Spring is the perfect time to enjoy all of the beauty that nature provides us. One really fun way to involve children in nature play is by creating and playing with real flowers! Whether you plant a flower garden or find wildflowers on a nature walk, there are plenty of kids’ activities you can do with them. Here are a few to get you started.

Kids Arts & Crafts Using Flowers

Flowers can actually serve as really great inspiration for some beautiful kids’ artwork! Here are some fun ways to combine nature with art:

• Make nature paintbrushes by attaching flowers to sticks or bundle flowers in a bouquet to paint with
• Use flower seeds to create homemade seed paper to plant your own flower garden
• Make a beautiful sun catcher using flower petals
• Investigate and explore flowers and use them as inspiration for still-life drawings
• Turn pressed flowers into bookmarks that kids will love to use
• Arrange dried flowers and add some eyeballs to turn your nature finds into an adorable flower bird craft
• Dry petals and adhere them to a mason jar to make a flower candle holder that allows you to enjoy your flowers all year long

Play Prompts with Real Flowers

Engaging the senses creates lasting impressions and allows for greater processing of information. These hands-on play experiences using real flowers are not only fun, but are also educational:

• Observe whether or not flowers float with a sensory bin, or turn them into flower soup (you can even add glitter to make this fairy flower soup!)
• Allow kids to practice creating flower arrangements, add a pair of scissors for trimming and water for filling a vase to encourage a flower arranging practical life activity
• Use fresh flowers to make a discovery bottle for fun flower observation
• Turn handpicked woven daisies into a beautiful flower crown or laminate flower petals and cut into the shape of a flower crown

Using Flowers for Learning

Fine and gross motor practice are important components of early learning, and incorporating nature into these practices is a really fun way to make learning enjoyable. Here are some ideas to try:

• Practice scissor skills by using flowers for cutting practice
• Laminate flowers to make the exploration of them a baby-safe activity
• Make a loom out of sticks and weave with flowers
• Place white flowers in jars with water and food coloring to create a color changing flower science experiment
• Add cut up dried flowers to water to make homemade potpourri

As we know, there are great benefits to outdoor play, and kids love to collect flowers while playing and exploring outdoors. These kids’ activities using flowers are such fun ways to incorporate a little bit of nature into early learning and play, and will put all of those collected flowers to good use!

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