Cultivating Creativity: Fun and Educational Floral Activities for Edmonton Families
With screens vying for kids’ attention, many parents are looking for simple ways to foster creativity, critical thinking, and hands-on skills.
Outdoor activities can be an easy way to do all three. Sifting through soil, finding fun shapes, and exploring the outdoors can stir kids’ imaginations while celebrating the world’s natural beauty.
When sourcing fresh, kid-safe blooms for your weekend projects, visiting a flower shop in Edmonton allows you to get expert advice from local florists on which stems are best for little hands. And even with just a handful of supplies and a lot of spunky attitude, kids and their families can make good use of an otherwise ordinary afternoon.
Easy Nature Crafts for Young Creators
Pressing flowers is a simple nature craft for kids. To do it, toddlers can pick some beautiful flowers, lay them between two pages of wax paper, and then place them in the pages of a heavy book for 1-2 weeks until they are dry. Once they are dried, preschoolers can use them to decorate bookmarks, cards, or picture frames.
Another good one is a nature scrapbook (or journal). Kids just collect flowers, leaves, or cool texture samples of what they see during a stroll through the neighbourhood or local park. When they get home, they can sort and arrange their samples onto pages of a scrapbook, then draw pictures, write notes, or create little stories about where each find was made.
Leaf tracings are one more easy craft that combines art with observation. Simply put the leaf under a piece of paper and lightly rub a crayon over the top of the paper. The cool designs that show up will often amaze kids enough that they are inspired to be more aware when looking at nature.
Learning Through Plants and Flowers
Flower-facing activities are not just paper crafts. They are also a learning experience. Did you know that if you're working with a flower, you are actually teaching kids something about science? If you are helping a kid take care of a flower, they get introduced to plant biology, that flowers or plants need water and sunlight, and they require careful management.
Working with plants requires patience. You don’t get instant gratification while painting with the petals of the flowers; you have to wait for the results. Waiting for something is unusual for the kids of the screen generation. Isn’t it an excellent way to teach them patience?
Flowers are entertaining in every sense. When kids touch a colourful, fragrant flower and arrange it on paper, they develop their motor, sensorium and observation skills. Handling real flowers with their variety of textures, colours, shapes, and smells opens up a range of multi-sensory experiences, even for toddlers. For new learners, it helps them improve their observing skills, and they will naturally become curious about the world around them.
Creating Bouquets with a Purpose
Extra meaning can be gained from a family project with just the simple addition of a bouquet. Have children gather a few flowers together that they can then hand off to others, perhaps a teacher, grandparent, neighbour, or friend. This can foster creative thinking as well as mindfulness and the practice of thinking of others.
There are no bounds. When children know they made it, even the smallest bouquet can be a source of delight.
Start Your Botanical Adventure This Weekend
Our world is beautiful and full of opportunities for learning, exploring and creating. Flowers are a fun way to start a few nature related activities; children can press them, scrapbook with them, trace them, cut and arrange a simple bouquet. All of this can be done indoors without the need of a screen. Just give them some flowers and watch them explore, ask questions and create
This afternoon grab a few flowers and clear some space on a table for your children to experiment with. There is so much beauty, science and creativity to be discovered!
