Make a beautiful laminated flowers crown using petals, leaves and treasures found outside on a nature walk together! A lovely art and craft activity for kids in the spring and summer months.
Each year we pick the petals that start to fall off flowers in the summer months, and use them as another loose part for play and crafting with. It’s such a shame to waste something so beautiful and the scent, colour and texture of petals makes them a wonderful, multi-sensory play material! In the past we have made some wonderful rose petal perfume and some flower petal soup, as well as adding them as a key ingredient to our outdoor concoctions kitchen.
We walked around our neighbourhood and through our own back garden to find petals that had already fallen, as well as some small flowers growing on our grass, then collected them into a bowl and took them home to start creating with!
This is SUCH a simple art activity as it only requires the petals and some laminating pouches. We have done similar before using contact paper (sticky back plastic) and that is equally beautiful, although a little more fiddly.
We simply took one large, A3 laminating pouch each, opened it up and then started to arrange our flowers, petals and leaves onto it. I did mine all randomly, as did the younger two girls, but Miss 6 made repeating patterns in hers which looked beautiful.
They enjoyed making them so much that they each did one or two more, and they started to experiment with turning the petals into art, arranging them to make flowers, butterflies and hearts.
Once we were happy with the final designs and were sure that the petals weren’t too close or overlapping (which would stop the plastic from sealing around them), we fed them very carefully through the laminating machine. We had to hold the sheets very carefully so that the flowers didn’t shift out of place.
This is the brand of A3 laminator that we use. I asked for it for Christmas one year and it was my best gift, which I am sure my fellow teachers will understand!
The laminator ironed the flowers flat and sealed them into place very tightly, making instant art for the window. The finished results looked beautiful just as they were and would certainly have made gorgeous sun catchers. But the girls wanted to turn them into crowns, bracelets and bookmarks, so that is what we have done with most of them.
We sliced the sheets lengthways into two equal width pieces (Miss 6 did hers independently) and then taped the ends together after measuring around their head circumferences.
Some had a wavy or zig zag top and others were flat. We managed to make one each plus plenty of laminated flowers sheeting left over for the extra bracelets and bookmarks.
This would make a lovely summer camp craft project or a party activity too!
What they are learning as they play:
creativity: using natural objects to make art, creating clothing and jewellery from art projects, combining 2D and 3D materials, pattern making
science: knowledge of the world around them, naming parts of a plant
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