Sunday, October 7, 2012

Another Homeschool Activity About Flowers and Butterflies

I was researching for activities and crafts that I can do with my kids when I chanced upon an interesting video by a preschool teacher.  I found it a good and easy activity that we can do as a follow up for the previous activities we had about flowers and butterflies.  I decided to do it a few days ago with my eldest son.  It was similar to the video I saw with some modifications.
 
Let me enumerate the steps on how we did it:
 
1.  We got a paper plate.
 
2.  We traced a petal on colored paper.  Since my son is still struggling with tracing, I needed to assist him in this.
 
3.  We cut the "petals" using scissors.  This was good practice for my son's fine motor skills.  He needs to practice more in cutting curves.
 
4.  My son glued each petal into the paper plate.  Again, this tested his impulse control as he squeezed glue out and spread it on one side of the petal.  Since we used tow colors of petals, I instructed him to glue the purple ones first and to leave a gap or space in between for the pink petals.
 
5.  Once the entire rim of the paper plate was covered with petals, I asked him to dot the center with yellow dots using a yellow marker.
 
6.  Next, I prepared a calamansi juice for him sweetened with honey on a cup.
 
7.  We placed the cup in the center of the paper plate flower we made.
 
 
 
8.  I gave my son a straw and he used it to drink the juice in the cup at the center of the paper plate.  But before that, I did some explaining and told him that we will pretend that he's a butterfly sipping the nectar from the flower.  I also mentioned about pollens and how butterflies help flowering plants.
 
That was our simple art and science activity with practice on fine motor skills.  My son loved drinking his calamansi juice pretending to be a butterfly in the days that followed. 
 
 
 
Another thing that I liked about this activity is that it enabled us to use scraps of colored paper and an extra paper plate to come up with a beautiful art project.  It's something that can be easily done by simply making use of things or objects that can be easily found at home.  In the original video, the teacher used a paper cup and glued it at the middle of the flower.  Since we didn't have a paper cup at home that day when we made it, we just used one of our cups.  Good thing we had an extra straw left so we used it for our activity.
 
Here's the link to the website where I saw the video that inspired me to do this activity.
 

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