Preschool Plant Activity - Pressed Flower and Leaves Nature Book

With this preschool plant activity, your preschooler can actually create a homemade nature book. You will also be creating an educational moment for your preschooler with this preschool plant activity. By pressing your own flowers and leaves and noting the names of the plants, your preschooler can learn all about flowers, leaves and plants.

What your Preschooler will Learn by Pressing Flowers and Leaves:

1. The various parts of leaves
2. The various parts of flowers
3. How to dry flowers and leaves to preserve them for always

What you will Need for a Nature Book:

1. Leaves and flowers
2. A phone book or another heavy book
3. Tissue paper or parchment paper
4. Construction paper
5. Glue
6. Sheet protectors
7. 3 - ring binder

What To Do:

Step one: Go for a walk with your preschooler and have them collect attractive leaves and flowers. If the weather is poor, go to a local indoor garden, hothouse or arboretum.

As your preschooler collects the flowers, point out the different parts—the petals, the anthers (the inside fuzzy looking bits,) the stigma (the vase shaped inside), the stem and any pollen. Point out that flowers start off as buds and over time gradually open into flowers. Teach your preschooler that flowers contain the tiny seeds that will grow new plants.

Explain the different parts of a leaf. Point out the blade (the main part of the leaf) and the veins. Teach your preschooler that leaves help the plant get sunlight and air that they need to grow big and strong.

Step two: After you and your preschooler have collected enough leaves and flowers, you’ll want to press them between two pieces of tissue paper or parchment paper. You can put several leaves and flowers together to use the same piece of tissue paper, but try not to let the flowers and leaves touch.

Step three: Put your tissue paper between the pages of your heavy book. Leave your book alone for a week to ten days.

Step four: After a week or ten days, take your tissue paper out of the book. Your flowers and leaves should be perfectly dried out and ready for your greeting cards.

Step five: Have your preschooler glue the flowers and leaves onto your construction paper. Write down the common names of the plants beneath the pressed flowers and leaves

Step six: Slide the pages into sheet protectors

Step seven: Arrange the sheet protectors in a 3-ring binder your preschooler has decorated.

Step eight: Have your preschooler continue to add to it. 

Variations:

1. Don't feel you're limited to just pressing flowers and leaves to make a nature book. Have your preschooler create homemade thank-you notes, greeting cards, holiday cards, gift tags or simply art with their pressed flowers and leaves. 

  

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