Creative Challenge: Flowers

I’m taking a little break from the kitchen today to participate in the latest Creative Challenge over at Tinkerlab.

Every 2 months Rachelle hosts a creative challenge for kids.  This month’s creative material was flowers.  And boy did I have trouble with this one.  Flowers are tough for me to get creative with.  Flowers are tough for my boys to get creative with, too.  Most of the time, my boys won’t even notice flowers unless I specifically point them out.

Wait I take that back…Little One likes to pull all of the flowers off of my potted plants.  My older son mostly ignores flowers.  Occasionally he’ll pick one and hold on to it for a bit and then nonchalantly toss it off to the side (100% boy, that one).

So I channeled my inner teacher (have I mentioned that I have a Master’s in Elementary Education?) and set up a little pre-math activity for my 4 year old (that counts as creativity, right?)

First we took a little walk around the house (during his brother’s nap) and collected flowers.  I had my son look for the flowers and hold the bucket.  At first I had to point out flowers, but as we went on, he started choosing them himself.

Once we collected the flowers, I had him sort them by color (I had written the colors in chalk on our deck before hand (why the deck?  My inner obsessive compulsive liked the even columns)) ßyay double parenthesis (hey, it’s the little things)!

It was really fun to watch him sort the flowers and make decisions on where to put the flowers, especially since many were two-toned or kind of in-between colors. 

By far my favorite was an indigo pansy.  At first he placed it under purple.  But when he picked up a more vibrant purple flower, he studied the two carefully and moved the indigo flower to the blue column.  It was a very neat moment to watch.

Once he had flowers all sorted, we tallied up each column.  We had a short discussion about which color had the most flowers, but it went over his head and I could tell that his attention was wavering.  So we backed up and just counted up the total number of flowers instead.

This was a super fun activity.  Next time we sort flowers, I’d love to make it an activity for both boys and collect flowers (and maybe other things (pinecones, etc)) from the park or maybe around the block and then do the sorting.  It would also be fun to re-sort the flowers under different categories.  Some suggestions might be: number of colors on the flower, how many petals, or part of the plant (if we collect things other than flowers).