Daffodil Day Art

I know that Daffodil Day is in August.... but better to blog about it later than never....

We made our daffodils to be displayed at the National Bank in Te Awamutu and they were easy and fun to make.

Materials required:

• green and yellow drinking straws
• yellow card
• "cups" from egg cartons
• yellow and/or orange paint
• green card
• polystyrene (from the packing in appliance boxes - we got ours from an appliance shop in TA)
• green paint
• glue gun and hot glue sticks

Firstly we cut out the egg "cups" from the egg cartons and the children choose to paint theirs either yellow or orange.

I gave each child 1/2 of an A4 piece of yellow card and showed them how to draw the petals - I drew like this:

Ofcourse my real drawing was a bit better than this one (done in Paint), but you get the gist.  Before cutting out the shape (in one piece!) I asked the children to rub out the internal pencil lines with a rubber and to rub out any remaining after cutting.

Then I made a hole in the centre of each petal and painted egg "cup" for them to put the straw in (I prefer to keep control of the stanley knife if you know what I mean).  We scored the petals along the now invisible pencil line with the tip of our scissors so we could bend in the petals.

We then put the green drinking straw through the hole and cut a 3-4cm piece from a yellow drinking straw.  You may be able to see that we cut the end of the yellow straw to make it look more frilly in the centre of our daffodil.  We also cut the other end of the short straw so it would fit over the green straw coming through more easily.  We secured the straws to each other, the petals and the egg "cup" with the hot glue.

Finally we cut thin strips of green card to look like the leaves of a daffodil plant and hot glued them to the sides.  It is a good idea to glue the leaves about 3cm up the green straw to allow the straw to slide into the polystyrene.

Meanwhile we had painted the polystyrene green and once that was dry and the daffodils complete, the children 'planted' their daffodils.  A nice touch is to add 'grass' to each block of polystyrene, by cutting green card to look like grass and glue to the side or slide into the polystyrene.