Flowers For Mom

A pretty flower on a sunny day. What a great little gift for Mom or Grandma! This simple craft uses basic materials and helps preschoolers practice early cutting skills. Let's get to it!

For materials, you'll need a paper cup, a pipe cleaner, some scraps of colored paper, tape, scissors, glue, and something to decorate the middle. We used these little adhesive sparkly gems because we had them and they're fun (and good for practicing fine motor skills!), but simple stickers, scraps of paper, or anything you can adhere to a waxy surface would work just fine.
Trim the top half of the cup off. I do this part for my children, but you can decide if you think your little one can handle the task.

Have your child snip straight lines from the cut edge down to the base of the cup. Perfection is not important here! Here's what you should wind up with...

Bend each strip down so that it forms a flat, sun-burst like shape. It's starting to look like a flower now!

Let your child decorate the center of the flower however he so chooses.

Tape the pipe cleaner to the back of the flower.

Fold two scraps of colored paper in half and draw a leaf on each. Again, I drew the leaf shape for my children, but you could also let the child do this part.



Have child cut out leaves...

And apply a thorough layer of glue to one "side" of each leaf.

Fold each leaf over the stem of your flower and press well so it is glued from edge to edge.

Enjoy your pretty new creation! You'll note that when I chose the materials for the flower at the beginning of this post, I (in typical adult fashion) went for a green pipe cleaner and green leaves and only one color for the center. I encourage you to allow your children to be creative! My son's pink-stemmed, purple-leaved, multi-colored-centered flower is much more fun than mine!

This post is linked to Works For Me Wednesday.