Spring has arrived bringing new life with green shoots, buds, leaves and flowers all around! It’s the perfect time to be out in nature as the sun shines more warmly upon us. Young children love to gather up nature’s gifts when you are out in the garden or on a meandering walk – and this beautiful Drewart wooden Flower Press offers a wonderful way to store pretty petals and foliage found along the way.
The Drewart wooden Flower Press is made from solid Alder plates, inside which are layers of corrugated cardboard ventilators and blotting paper. Held together with four wooden nuts and bolts, pressure is applied evenly by turning the large wooden nuts on top of the press as the plants dry.
Once your flowers are dried, you can use them in fun and creative ways. Children are naturally creative and by making things they can use at home, important capacities are developed.
Positive benefits:
- Gathering flowers and leaves involves being out in nature, requiring children to move their bodies in natural and
- healthy ways as they forage, scramble over logs and uneven surfaces- all positive physical and sensory developmental activities.
- Inviting exploration and enquiry: you might like to learn more about particular flowers you have discovered or the environments in which they grow. Or plant flower seedlings and watch them grow.
- Integrating the flower pressing into other enrichening activities such as reading poems, stories or verses about the seasons and flowers. This builds language and the imagination.
Here’s a poem to read together today!
The Daisy
In the early Springtime, when the violets grow,
When the birds sing sweetly, and the soft winds blow,
Comes the little daisy, blooming fresh and fair,
Springing bright and joyous in the morning air.
Sunny little blossom, on your slender stalk,
How much you would teach us if you could but talk!
Ever looking upward, all the livelong day,
Bright your faces turn to catch each sunbeam’s ray.
Author: T F Steward.
There are many wonderful books which build imaginative pictures for children with a seasonal theme – we love Elsa Beskow’s The Flowers’ Festival available at Honeybee or visit your local library.
Enjoy your Drewart Flower Press!
