Handprint Flowers for Mother's Day
Develop Fine Motor Skills with a Garden Themed Art Project
Apr 11, 2008
This spring add to a multi-disciplinary garden unit and help your students to create personally crafted handprint flowers for Mother's Day!
Content Areas: fine motor skills(tracing, scissor skills, pincer grasp, folding, pencil grasp, handwriting readiness), art
Materials: Construction paper, crayons, pencils, flexi-straws, scissors, tape
Optional Materials: tissue paper, terra cotta pots, paint pens, brown paper gift bags, letter and spring themed stampers
Making Handprint Flowers:
- Tracing: Ask students to trace their own hand using a crayon or pencil on a colorful piece of construction paper.
- Cutting: Tell students to cut along the traced line.
- Rolling: Using a pencil, students should use a pincer grasp to curl each finger of the cut-out hand.
- Wrapping: Ask students to wrap the curled handprint around a flexi-straw with the fingers pointing up. The top of the straw should reach the bottom of the curled fingers. Help students to tape their handprint to the straw in order to create flower petals. The long end of the straw acts as a flower stem.
- Tracing: Ask students to trace their pointer and middle fingers onto GREEN construction paper.
- Cutting: Tell students to cut out the two-finger image. They should keep an extra one-inch u-shape below the fingers.
- Wrapping: Wrap the bottom of the green two-finger cut-out around the straw right at the base of the handprint petals. Help students to tape the leaves to the straw while they use a pincer grasp to hold the paper steady.
- Folding: Demonstrate for students how to fold the leaves back so that they look like leaves.
- Cutting: Ask students to measure and cut a one-inch by one-inch square piece of construction paper of another bright color. Then, being careful not to cut all the way through the square, show students how to cut tiny fringes into the paper.
- Rolling: Help students to tightly roll their fringed one-inch square. Again, students will need to use their pincer grasp for this activity. Stuff the non-fringed end of the rolled up paper into the end of the straw that is peeking out of the petals.
A Mother's Day Gift
Each student should now have a beautiful personalized flower. If time permits, allow students to make several more flowers to create a bouquet. The flowers could be presented in colorful wrapped tissue paper or stuck into floral foam in an inexpensive terra cotta pot. Students may enjoy decorating the pots with paint pens prior to "planting" their flowers. (Classroom Management Hint: Allow pots to dry before "planting.")
For an extra touch and continued fine motor practice, allow students to decorate brown paper gift bags with stampers. Students may also use stampers to decorate the tissue paper. Place the final products in the decorated bags and allow students to add a handmade card decorated with paper hand flowers
Garden Bulletin Board Idea
Handprint flowers make colorful additions to spring themed bulletin boards. Staple bundles of student-made handprint flowers behind green paper grass or bright colored paper window boxes to create a 3-D garden. Consider using yellow and orange student handprints stapled at the palms to create a dazzling sun to warm the bulletin board garden plot.
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