What’s on Our Shelf: Flower Theme

Spring in Texas is one of the best inventions! Warm sunshine, cool breezes and endless time outside! People travel the world over to see our exceptional wildflowers during this time of year, which always makes me excited to teach about flowers!

For this theme we have a mix of sensory, art, math, outdoors, and science!

You’ll need:

• Fake and real flowers
• Colored cups (I used egg coloring cups from the dollar tree)
• Dice
• Jars or vases
• Paper towel tubes
• Paper towel holder
• Kinetic sand (or dirt)
• Flower Printable (available at the bottom of this post)
• Paint
• Small pieces of cardboard

Math and sorting activities

This roll and fill math game has been such a fun new twist on counting and subsitizing! Simply roll the dice, pick out the correct number of flowers and add them to the jar. You could fill the jar and have children take the flowers out. You could race to fill your jar. Or even use two cubes to add or subtract numbers!

Using some egg coloring cups, I set up an easy color matching activity with our dollar store flowers.

You could use any type of colored cup or bowl for this set up!

Art Projects

My buddies had the best time painting with flowers! I could barely take a picture beforehand because they were so excited. This one is as easy as it sounds. Put some paint on a tray and give your kids real flowers to use as paintbrushes!

We added these vase cards to our daily walk with varied success! I suggest making big enough holes so preschoolers are able to push stems through on their own!

Sensory Play

Kinetic sand is one of my favorite tools. This chocolate version has stood the test of time for the last few years. We love adding it to a spring planting bin. You could also use real dirt or black beans.

Using some jars, lids, and cupcake liners as flowers and our old DIY rainbow we created a fun pollination sensory bin. The kids pretended to be bees bringing pollen to the hive!

Science

I wanted my friends to learn about the parts of a flower in a fun fine motor way! I created a simple printable with all the parts of a flower and labels. I glued each piece onto paper towel tubes cut down into smaller pieces.

You could use this printable in a variety of ways other than using a stacking toy. Cut the pieces apart for your child to create his or her own flower. Print two copies of the cards for matching. Play a hide and seek game by hiding pieces around the room!