Paper Flower Bouquets and Pretend Florist Shop

Today’s post is super versatile - It can work as a Valentine day craft, Valentine’s day activity or a homemade Valentine’s day gift. With a 4 yr old who loves role/pretend play activities, this Valentine’s day we are setting up shop to play florist and make wonderful paper flowers arrangements. As part of our Valentine day craft activities, we have been making flowers from coffee filters, cotton rounds, construction paper and pipe cleaners and this activity just ties it all into a simple playdate opportunity with so much fun and learning.

To start off, we focus on this activity as a Valentine day craft

• Flowers – make your own or take the easy route and use silk flowers.
• Our Flowers need
• Colored Pape
• Cotton Rounds and balls
• Coffee filters
• Muffin Liners
• Pipe Cleaners
• aper Bouquet – make sure to snip off the cone to allow the stem to pass through.
• Cash register
• Florist and Customers

Using the above mentioned materials, we have been creating flowers. Now to create the flowers, I let my child drive me. She would pick up a cotton round and color it and I simply helped by adding a pipe cleaner with a bead to make it look like a flower. We cut some petals to it and pulled it a little back and taped it to the pipe cleaner to give it its shape.She made some more by rolling a construction paper, making cones, cutting out heart shapes, coloring coffee filters. It was a fun process to make flower stalks and arranging the flowers. Craft activities can be a little tricky because they don’t have to be open ended. Here we always try to make any activity as open ended as possible. How? By encouraging the child to create and make their own flowers - from their imagination. Even if she cannot create the entire flower independently I would always talk about the process and have her express her idea. Then it is only the matter of developing the adequate fine motor skills to implement the idea. Instead of a tutorial here is a snap shot. Painted coffee filters with muffin liners in the middle made a bunch of flowers Yellow colored paper twisted like “curly fries” made another bunch Various colored papers cutout into heat shapes made the final bunch Pipe cleaners were the flower stalks and paper cones were bouquet covers.

It was interesting to see with every flower we made Big S was eager to name it something. Of course it never looked like the real deal, so, we started to name them what we liked. This is the best part of any activity, to see what learning can come from it. Trust me, even I learn something new every time we do stuff together. Holding the pipe cleaners, gluing them, arranging all the flowers, cutting the petals - Fine motor skills development galore.

Valentine’s day Activities - Pretend Play Florist

So, coming back to our creations, now that we made so many flowers I set up a play scene to play Florist. We sorted through all our flowers and put them into different containers. We made a few paper bouquet to hold the arrangements. We glued some, cut some, taped some and did all sorts of experiments to create our fun flowers arrangements.

Big S loved being the customer and the florist. While making flower shop we talked about money, practice numerical skills with the cash register. Role Play games are a fantastic tool for language development and gently introducing any concept.

Valentine day craft as a gift for your loved one The cute paper flower bouquets can also be used a heartfelt and wonderful gift to anyone the kid chooses.

May be dads can do this craft with the kids and surprise moms with a handmade flower bouquet or vice versa.

Other Valentine’s day crafts we have done.

• Rose Scented Play dough
• Rose Scented Valentine’s day cloud dough recipe
• Valentine’s day hand print cards
• Valentine’s day straw blown cards
• Valentine’s Heart Butterflies

Thanks for reading