MAMA Children’s Activity Post: “Flowers for MAMA”

With my son’s favourite painting tool being the cotton-bud and my favourite flowers being hydrangeas we decided to combine these to make some lovely flowery Mother’s Day Cards.

Equipment;

For the painting bit:

Plastic activity mat/old towel.
Aprons/painting clothes.
Paper plates.
Pastel colour paints (water based Non-toxic).
Cotton buds.
Elastic hair bands.
White cards.

For the decoration bit:

Piece of card.
Pencil.
Scissors.
Felt tip pens.
Pastel coloured craft foam sheets.
Double sided sticky tape.

Step 1: Preparation.

Put activity mat on floor or table. Put out your paints (I used pastel blue, purple and pink), paper plates and cards. Tie a bunch of cotton buds together, I did this using an elastic hair band but you could use tape/elastic bands etc and add these to your painting area.

Step 2: Flower painting and paint swirling!

I dipped the bunches of cotton buds into the paint and showed my son how they made the marks on the card. I then let him have fun mixing the colours and making lovely flowers on the cards. After doing this he decided he wanted to use the cotton buds to mix up the paints into lovely swirly colours so it turned into a bit of messy play/sensory exploration at the end!

Step 3: Tidy tidy tidy up!

Put your cards aside to dry. As with the sheep cards from the last post most of the things used in this activity are not reusable so it was a quick tidy, wipe down the mat and then bath time!

Step 4: Flower decorating.

I did a variety of things for these cards depending on how the marks ended up on the card so you really can mix and match. For some of them I drew around my son’s hand on some card then used this as a template to cut out foam fingers which we stuck onto the cards with double sided sticky tape to look like stems of flowers.

I also cut out foam shaped flower pots to stick on the cards (again using double sided sticky tape as this is easier for my son at the moment but you could use PVA glue). I used the flower pots as the area to write “Mum” or whatever you wish to write with felt tip pens.

To give the flowers a bit more definition I drew round them with felt tip pens of the same colour, I also drew little leaves in random places to fill out the space.

And there you go some lovely flower cards to give to your MAMA’s for Mother’s Day!

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