This is a fun art activity for children and the end results are bright colorful pictures for your Earth Day bulletin boards. The previous September the children had helped plant milkweed, chives wallflowers and salvia to create a butterfly garden. Our mild winters on the west coast of BC, Canada makes this possible.
Refresh the children’s memories by showing them pictures of the butterfly garden flowers they had helped create in the fall and by taking a trip to the garden to see how the plants were doing at the end of April.
Read books that increase the children’s awareness of the important relationship between plants and animals. Wolf Island is a perfect book to help students understand the delicate balance of an ecosystem. See this post for more information on using the book.
Pressed Weeds Earth Day Art
Each Autumn, the children gather common weeds, such as buttercup, dandelions, dock and bits of dried plants, then press and dry them in a stack of old phone books or catalogues. These dried plants are then saved for projects throughout the school year.
If you don’t have dried weeds, hopefully there are some (not covered in snow) where you live! Gather and press them for a week and they should be ready to use.
Part One - gathering and drying the plants
Prior to beginning the project talk about which plants to pick, show pictures of buttercups, dandelions and other plants around your school or home that the children can use for their pictures. Make sure kids know if there are areas where they shouldn’t pick plants and how to take just a few flowers and leaves from each plant.
- Take children outside and have all children gather weeds and dried plants.
- Place plants in one container.
- Have children work in centers and take turns placing plants on top of paper towels in an open page of an old phone book.
- Put another piece of paper towel on top.
- Close the books and put them aside for a week or two.
Materials:
- Weed flowers, leaves or dried weeds
- Old phone books or catalogues for pressing plants
- Photocopy paper box lid for dried plants
- Paper towels
- White cartridge paper 12″ x 18″
- Bright poster paints
- White liquid glue
Part Two - painting the pictures
Talk to the children about the Earth Day activities they have been participating in and what they could paint to demonstrate those events.
- Paint a few sample pictures, keeping them big and bold.
- Children put names on the back of their papers.
- Have children paint on a flat surface, using limited colors and bright thick poster paints.
- Notice in the sample the colors were limited to red, yellow, green and black.
- Let pictures dry and then put aside.
Part Three - handling the dried materials
- Bring out the phone books or catalogues and once again during a center time, have children carefully take turns removing the dried plants.
- Demonstrate first.
- A lid from a photocopy paper box is just right for spreading the dried plants in.
Part Four - gluing the dried weeds on the picture
- Distribute the paintings to the first group of kids at center time.
- Give each group a portion of the dried plants.
- Have students take turns gluing 5 or 6 plant items on their pictures with white liquid glue.
- Let dry
- Have each child print a sentence about their Earth Day participation (or help them do so) and glue the sentence on the picture.
- Display the picture on a colorful background.