Cupcake Liner Garden Theme Craft

We did a cupcake liner flowers scene as a cut and paste craft for our spring theme. They turned out REALLY cute!

And the older one did another one, preschool level, for our Garden Theme.

Click HERE for printable.

For the first one...

We folded a piece of cardstock at the one-third mark to create a dividing line for the children to color the top two-thirds blue and the bottom one-third green.

I place a variety of green and blue crayons in the middle of the table for them to choose from. This is a good color recognition assessment. 

3 1/2 years old

2 1/2 years old

Obviously some skill differences between the ages, but even the just turned 2s were able to do blue on top and green on bottom for the most part.

Then we glued on the cupcake liners. As a fine motor skill, they helped in separating them out and placing them on the table. I asked if they wanted two or three flowers and then they counted out the spots to glue and number of liners to choose. Stick glue was best for this. School glue would have soaked up the liners.

In discussing flowers, it was decided they needed pollen in the middle, so a golden crayon was carefully sought out and utilized.

Then we added shelled sunflower seeds to the centers.

There was more fine motor dexterity involved than I had anticipated. Even the older girls had to work at picking up the little seeds and placing each one. It was an excellent fine motor activity.

Just turned 2 year old.

Since it is a CUT and paste activity, I let the 3 year old go at it with the scissors. I simply told her to cut a straight line to the end. She did REALLy well at it. If she had a piece too wide, I just asked her to cut it in half. We measured length on her picture and she cut them to size. 

She decided to cutting up one of her strips and ended up with a bunch of smaller pieces. So, she used these for leaves.

The younger children worked with me using teacher-assist scissors for their cutting.

One of them noticed the green crimped grass in the crafts bin, and wanted some. So, we added that to their grass areas. It made for a nicely textured art piece.

For the second one...

I printed out my template and folded the side and bottom back and let her paint blue, mixing the paint to her desired color.

Once dry, I folded it back and let her paint the bottom fourth brown. Then proceeded along in the same manner as the first one. However, I did draw out ovals for her to cut out for leaves, adding an additional fine motor skill of cutting on a curve.

For this one, she cut white yarn to glue on as roots. She got a little carried away with the glue, so I helped spread it out. Didn't she do an amazing job of getting the pieces the same size? I didn't tell her to do that. I actually wanted them different lengths, but hey, her project. We discussed how her yarn pieces were about one inch long and measured them with a ruler.

While I'm not into worksheets much, they do provide some good fine motor, spelling, letter recognition and writing practice occasionally, along with kindergarten readiness. At almost 4, she was able to sound out all these words, with me reminding her that oo says "oo" in roots.

We could have added a sun and cloud in the sky as an added science add-on. We just didn't. I used this to cover the parts of a plant, rather than what they need.

SKILLS:
Math: one-third, two-thirds, one-fourth, counting flowers, stems, seeds, length measurement
Science: parts of a plant, natural elements
Fine Motor: cut, glue, crayon grasp, painting, separating the cupcake liners, placing of the seeds/stem/grass/etc.  
Art: creative expression, mixed media, texture, 3D art, color recognition, color choice
Language: parts of a flower, fraction terms, 
Social: following directions
Tags: flower, craft, cupcake liner, flower craft, spring, mother's day, may, april, flowers, science, art, texture, mixed media, worksheet, parts of a flower, preschool, childcare, daycare, pre-k, prek, kindergarten, first grade, 1st grade, plant physiology, fine motor, skills, painting, cut, paste, glue, writing, spelling, word wall, printable, free