Teach Preschool » Flowers

Still life flower drawings in kindergarten

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:20:12 +0000

This is the final activity we did with our flower bouquets. You can see the other posts here > painting with flowers, a flower canvas, and cutting flower stems. I have also seen many different folks share about still life drawings which made me really want to give this a try with the kids…

To get this activity started, I set out a bouquet of flowers in a vase, paper, and some crayons. I talked with the children before hand how they can select a flower and take it out to draw or leave it in the vase to draw…

We also talked briefly about the lines and shapes we see in a flower. I wanted to guide the children’s attention to some of the finer details of the flowers just a bit….

What I like about the still life drawings is how the children use something that is meaningful and real as a guide to their creative expression. Often times, we ask children to draw from memory alone – like when we ask children to draw a picture of their mom or their house.

This is a different kind of experience that I believe brings additional value to their drawing experience as it challenges their understanding and ability to look at the finer details of everyday objects in their environment….

Even though the flowers were in front of them, some of the children still elected to draw a combination of the real flower as well as their own perspective or interest in what the flowers look like to them…

I would like to try this activity with a variety of different objects in the future and as I do, gradually draw the children’s attention to the finer details. Only after we did this activity did I realize that there are so many details that we tend to overlook….

Here are a few still life drawings that others have tried…

F is for Flower (still life drawings) from Brilliant Beginnings Preschool

Drawing a Still Life from Kat’s World

Drawing Flowers (outdoors) from PreKinders

F is for Still Life Flower Drawings from Preschool Daze

Mirror Drawing from Irresistible Ideas for Play Based Learning

Still Life Painting from Brick by Brick

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Cutting flower stems in preschool

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Wed, 11 May 2011 23:00:15 +0000

Cutting flower stems in preschool

Perhaps I should have titled this post “Attempting to cut flower stems in preschool” because child scissors don’t make much of a dent in the stems. However, one of our students figured out how to make this work….

These are left-over stems from our flower bouquets which I posted about yesterday here for painting and here for flower canvas….

This little girl figured out that it was easiest to bend or snap the stem in half first, then cut the stem apart the rest of the way…

The flower stem center was actually an interesting center to include on our flower bouquet day. The bending and cutting of stems led to a little exploration in science and nature as the children examined the stems and a little fine motor skill building as the children worked to cut or bend or snap the stems into pieces…

There was really no objective here other than additional exploration of the flowers. How often do we let children explore or play with an expensive bouquet of flowers anyway? I usually just throw them away but this time, I realized that they would make for some interesting play and exploration….

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Painting with a bouquet of flowers in preschool

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:06 +0000

Did you save the flower bouquet for preschool? I have shared how the kindergarten class made a flower canvas from a flower bouquet that was just about ready to be thrown out. Here are some additional activities to use up those flowers from the flower bouquet as well…

While at one table, the children were making a flower canvas, at another table the children were painting with flowers…

For this table, I clipped the stems of the flowers leaving just enough stem for a handle and the top of the flower for a paint brush..

Some of the children preferred to use the flowers as paintbrushes and stroke the paint on their paper…

Other’s preferred to use the flowers more like stamps and print the flower shapes on their paper (Miss Martin even thought she would give this a try)…

The children used cotton swabs to make the stems of their flowers….

Then they dipped the flowers in the paint and added the flowers to the top of their painted stems…

Here are a few of our final flower paintings…

So don’t throw away that flower bouquet just yet!

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Save the bouquet of flowers for preschool

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Did you get a bouquet of flowers recently? Are they just about ready to throw out? Well before they get too far gone and you decide to throw them out – turn the flowers into a bit of preschool fun!

I went around and gathered some flower bouquets that were just about done in and shared them with Miss Martin’s kindergarten class…

We actually did several activities with the left-over flowers which I will share more on. The first activity we tried was a large group flower canvas. I have seen quite a few variations of this idea online and loved them all. For our flower bouquet canvas, I cut the center out of one side of a left-over piece of cardboard box.

I added clear contact paper to one side of the box then set it out on a table (sticky side up) with a handful of left-over flowers…

The children were given a few instructions. They were to…

Pluck the flowers, petals, and leaves off the stems.
Create flower designs on the sticky paper by arranging the flower pieces on the canvas.
Not to just take a whole flower and stick it on the canvas (even though some did anyway

The children loved doing this – they loved snapping the stems and plucking the petals. Some tried to use scissors to cut the stems and quickly discovered it was much easier just to snap them in half….

I had a nice selection of all sorts of flowers set out. Many of the teachers and administrators were given flowers for Teacher Appreciation week and so they were happy to donate them….

Each of the children rotated through several centers of flower bouquet activities and took a turn adding to the flower canvas…

Some of the children preferred to add the entire flower or flower head to the canvas but most of the children designed each flower piece by piece…

Once every one took a turn (or several turns) adding flowers to our canvas, I added a second sheet of contact paper to seal the flowers in between – and to keep them from falling off…

The only thing I was left wondering is if there is a difference in the types of contact paper. This paper didn’t seem as sticky as I had hoped it would be…

But here is our finished canvas – it turned out beautiful. It has a 3-D look which the photos really don’t show that well and it looks lovely in the window…

I am curious how long the flower colors will stay pretty – we will soon see!

See this beautiful flower petal stained glass window from The Artful Parent!

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Is this flower taller or shorter than a preschooler?

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:20:01 +0000

I happen to stop by this classroom and the teacher had a very tall paper flower sitting out on a table…

The children were very excited about this flower so to build on their enthusiasm, we decided to see who (or which) was taller – the flower or the child…

All the children hurried up to lay down on the ground so I could place the flower next to them and oh my, you would have thought this was the most exciting thing ever!!

The children had made their own construction paper flowers earlier in the day so this big flower was something that they were very excited about too…

After we all took a turn comparing flower to child - the teacher sang the seed song.

The seed begins in the garden, tiny and small...

It happens to be one of my favorites….

But then it grows and grows and grows - big and tall!

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