Making fake flowers for outdoors

[quizator]

I was thinking of getting the pre-school children from the nursery my kids go to involved in brightening up the front of the building by planting some flowers.

I then heard that in previous years with hosepipe bans some nurseries had got the children to make and paint flowers to put in window boxes. I thought this would be quite a good idea as we have lots of shaded areas and it means no watering needed but can't think of what materials that would be good that would stand up to a bit of good old british weather. Any ideas?

Well I would use some particle board and get a friendly person who has a jigsaw to cut you a load of templates out....make a simple sillouhette out of card...or three different ones...say a tulip type flower, a daisy like flower and a poppy like flower...give them to the person who has the jigsaw...cut them out and then the DC can paint them with something like tester pots or if thats a bit too messy (though emulsion washes out and isn;t really toxic) you could use poster paints....but the flowers would need varnishing in order to preserve them...a good outdoor clear varnish for eg.

Other than that, you could make them using wooden dowels (very cheap in DIY and gardening shops) and then use recycled materials to construct flowers heads...I'm thinking of thiings like jam jar lids for the centres with petals cut from coloured plastic bags...this would be made in the same way as you make crepe paper flowers...cut long strips aboutthree inches wide and about two feet long (you mght have to stick two lengths together) and then snip the width all along...to make a frayed strip...then attach using a glue gun and winding them around themselves to make a sort of Dahlia...

You could eperiment yourself with lots of things...plastic bottles, lids, cartons...bags....anything made from plastic. You don't have to colour them or paint them as once you get a recognisable flowr shape with a leaf or two they'd look cute in rows.

look here

And here

As they are nursery age, how about something simple such as getting hold of bits of tree/bush branches & using that colourful foam sheeting you buy in craft suppliers, cut lots of leaf & petal & flower shapes & let the DCs decorate the branches with the cut out shapes & then stick them into the ground, maybe hold with a bit of cement & make them look as if they are growing there

Painting rocks & pebbles into colourful insects, ladybirds etc might finish it off nicely

Thanks for the useful ideas and the links. I will investigate!