Currently Reading:
As we move further into spring, we decided to read The Gardener by Sarah Stewart and illustrated by David Small. Set during the Great Depression Era and told through letters between a young girl and her grandmother, this book offers a warm encouragement to plant seeds of kindness. When Lydia Grace Finch moves to the city to live with her grouchy uncle, she brings a suitcase of seeds and compassionate nature. Through small acts of kindness, she brings warmth and light into the lives of those around her. While in the book, Lydia plants a garden to share with her neighbors, readers can reflect on what small acts of kindness they can do to bring smiles to those around them.
Craft: Make Your Own Garden Inside!
You will need different colored paper, a pencil, scissors, and painter’s tape. For my flowers, I used red, yellow, and orange for the petals, brown for the center, and green for my stem. You will also need a bit of free wall space.
Step One:
To make the templates that I use for the petals, I always start at the corner of a page to give the petal its point and then draw a curve that connects on the other side. For this craft, I made three different sizes.
Step Two:
When you have all your templates cut out, trace your petals, and then cut them out.
You’ll end up with a pile of petals!
Step Three:
Cut out oval shapes for your center.
Step Four:
Roll pieces of painter’s tape and stick them on the back of your cut-out pieces.
Step Five:
To start my flower, I clumped the brown ovals together to look like the center of a sunflower, and then I added in yellow petals.
Next, I layered the colors I wanted around the yellow and repeated until I ran out of petals. While I only have one flower pictured here, I plan on making more to turn my wall space into a “garden” of colors!
As a side note, my two younger cousins really loved when we did this craft together at my house and asked if we could make a “paper garden” at their mom’s. I agreed but decided to add an extra layer to it. They are very close in age they’ve been fighting over their space/belongings. This time, I cut all the petals out beforehand and divided them up. I then wrote their names on the back so there could be no accusations about petal stealing. I hoped to teach them a lesson about working together and how they can each bring their own unique talents to make something that is beautiful. In the future, I might use this as a reward tracker (if they do something good, they can choose to put up two petals, if they do something bad, two petals get taken down, etc.).