Sunflower Height Pictures

We have had great success with sunflowers in our garden this year. Earlier in the summer my children helped to plant sunflower seeds into pots, which we kept inside for a few weeks before planting out into our garden.The kids really enjoyed looking after and watering their plants and arguing over who was going to grow the biggest sunflower. Our last sunflower in now just coming into bloom and it is measuring 2.25m tall!

I really wanted to celebrate our success with an arts and crafts projects inspired by our fantastic sunflowers. We have been completing our “Back to School Questionnaires” as well which gave me a great idea. Instead of just writing down their height, I would help each of my three children a sunflower picture that was the same size as them.

We set off doing this activity outside as it was a nice sunny day. This turned out to be a mistake though, as it proved to be very tricky to keep the long sheets of paper firmly on the ground! My 4year old was getting particularly frustrated so we decided to bring the activity back indoors.

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The downside of doing this indoors meant that we didn’t have as much room to spread out three big sheets of paper at once. We decided then to work together on one sunflower picture at a time.The “owner” of the picture took full artistic control of their picture and the other two then assisted. This worked well when boys helped their little sister out, but she wasn’t as keen to give up “artistic control” when we were doing the boys pictures. We got there in the end though and we were really happy with the results.

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How to make Sunflower Height Pictures:

• Ask your child to lie down on a large sheet of paper and mark off where the
  bottom of their feet and the top of their head is. An easel roll works
  really well for this.
• Draw a large circle using the marking for your child’s head as a guide. We used
  baking tin lids for this.
• Cut out petal shapes using different shades of yellow paper and tissue paper.
• Glue the petals around the circle.
• Coverthe inside of the circle with glue and scatter sunflower seeds over it
  gently pressing them down into the glue.
• To create the long stalk either cut out strips of green paper and glue them
  down or paint it on using green paint.
• If you have some leaves to hand then use these to either make leaf rubbings
  or leaf printings onto the side of the stalk.  We found that leaf printing worked
  better as our paper was a bit too thin to stand my kids vigorous leaf rubbing!
• Leave this to dry flat. If you try to lift it up before the glue has dried all
  of the sunflower seeds will drop off!

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