Well what with all this glorious weather we have been having this week, it certainly feels like summer is on it’s way!!!! With the sun shining and the gardens beginning to explode with beautiful colours and scents of summer flowers, I felt inspired to create a child friendly flower crown for all those wild flower fairies and elves out their.
what you need…
- 4 pipe cleaner
- scissor
- flowers (I chose 2 different ones, such as baby’s breath and chrysanthemums, as they last long enough without water and have a good spray of flowers per stem)
- ribbon
what you do…
- with 2 of your pipe cleaners, attach them at both ends to make a circle
- then taking your 3rd pipe cleaner, attach it to the circle and wrap it around and around the pipe cleaner, quite tightly but leaving enough of a gap to thread the flowers in and secure at the end
- with your 4th pipe cleaner do the same as you did your 3rd and secure at the end
- cut your flowers to roughly about 10cm in length
- begin by threading your flower stems through the gaps between the ‘wrap around’ pipe cleaners, and if need be thread back on themselves
- continue until you have used up all of your flowers and made a really full crown
- attach some ribbon to the back of the crown and secure the pipe cleaners together
- go out into the meadows and enjoy!!!
into a little dreams adventure…
- encourage the curiosity in a child by giving them the opportunity to explore the flowers around them
- this activity is fantastic at encouraging hand eye coordination and concentration in a child, maybe continue with a threading activity, using any left over pipe cleaners to thread little beads onto, the perfect accessorise to any crown
- using scissors to cut the flowers, and then line the flowers up in a row, encouraging open ended discussion by asking questions such as – how many of each stem do you have? what colours do you see? how many different species of flower do you have? do you know the names of these flowers? can you name the various parts of a flower? using words such as stem, petal, leaf etc
- go into the garden and choose some of the flowers from garden, discussing the shape and size of each and if they might be appropriate for a crown? do the have thorns? are they too big or too small?
- wonder into you local florist and talk to them about all the different species of flowers? which ones smell the nicest? which ones are the tallest? which ones are the shortest?
- maybe ask your child to think of a letter, and then see if there is a flower that begins with that letter!!! make you own alphabet chart with all the flowers of the world
