May is National Flower Month and a great month for children’s craft projects. With May Day, Mother’s Day, and Memorial Day there are lots of great holidays in May that you and your children can make crafts for. Here is one we have done and it’s also one of our favorites. They can be made simple for tiny hands or more complex for that budding Picasso.

For May Day this year we created May baskets. This is a great craft for the younger ones to practice scissor skills and the older ones to hone in on theirs. It is simple and typically you can find the items needed in your craft drawer or purchase inexpensively. To get started, you will need the following supplies. This list will make one May flower basket.

–Small shoebox without the lid. (Kids shoe boxes work the best.)
–4-6 sheets of construction paper, any colors will do, think grass and flowers here.
–Elmer’s glue or a stapler. (Help smaller children with the stapler, however, it does hold better than the glue.)
–4 green pipe cleaners cut in half.
–Age appropriate scissors.
–Crayons or markers.
–Styrofoam square cut to fit inside the shoebox. Should be at least one to two inches thick and cover the entire bottom.
–Popsicle sticks or toothpicks if needed.
–Any additional decorations that your child enjoys working with, such as; glitter, pom-poms, yarn, beads, etc.

First take one piece of construction paper and cut to fit the front of your shoebox, and allow child to decorate it. Once decorated glue or staple it to the front of your shoebox. You can also have your child repeat this step for all four sides if desired. Now glue the Styrofoam square to the inside of the shoebox.

Second, take another piece of construction paper and cut one long strip approximately one inch wide to serve as your baskets handle. Staple or glue into place, remember, stapling this into place will hold the handle in place better than the glue.

Third, use the remainder of the construction paper, less one sheet to be used later, to create flower petals. They can be made from hand outlines, which is what we used, or circles, squares, triangles, whatever is at your child’s ability to cut out with minimal to no assistance. Then allow your child to color or decorate as desired. Use the Elmer’s glue to put the flower petals together any way that your child prefers is fine. Allow the decorated and glued flower petals to dry for about a half-hour to an hour.

Fourth, once dried take your pre-cut pipe cleaners; there should be 8 short ones, to use as the flowers stems. They can either be glued to the back of the flower or stapled on. This is another time that we found stapling to be more effective. If your child created large flowers add a Popsicle stick or toothpick to the back of the flower for additional support.

Fifth, take the last piece of construction paper and have your child cut it into small strips that are no longer than an inch or wider than ½ an inch, set aside. If you stapled your flowers to the pipe cleaner, then place them inside the basket pressing them down into the Styrofoam as far as they will go. If you used glue you will need to allow that to dry before putting into the Styrofoam. Once all flowers are arranged, add the shredded paper to the basket as grass to cover the Styrofoam.

Now you should have a completed May flower basket to enjoy!

Submitted by Lea:

Spring is one of my son’s favorite times. After a long cold winter, we look forward to spring fun like our long morning walks (weather permitting, of course – those spring storms don’t always make it easy!), time at the playground, and fun in the backyard sandbox. Bath days are his favorite days in the spring, because those are the days that he gets to go outside and get as muddy as he wants without getting yelled at by Mom!

Last year was the first year that he was old enough to really enjoy the time outside. We purchased one of those bubble kits that can create the really big bubbles, and Dad and I drew out some gigantic ones that he could chase across the yard. We even figured out, thanks to the instructions, how to blow little bubbles inside the big bubbles with a little bubble wand and the large bubble circle. A word to anyone thinking about doing this: not all dogs are friendly to bubbles in their yard. You might want to test bubbles on your dog before launching into a full-fledged bubble blowing session. Our son was so disappointed on the first day when we had to pack up after just a few minutes because the dog went bonkers. Luckily, we found leaving her inside with a huge rawhide chew would distract her successfully for enough time to get a lot of bubbles blown!

We also did a lot of hiking last spring. At first, we took him along in the backpack carrier…there were a lot of questions coming from up above about the trees, birds, and other nature that he was seeing from that vantage point! It was a great opportunity to get him in touch with the great outdoors, and we learned a lot too. Any question that we didn’t know the answer to, we would research on the Internet when we returned home. We found an amazing site that would help identify a plant just based on the descriptive characteristics. We started taking home some of the leaves and flowers originally to help us look them up online, but we ended up saving them and making a scrapbook of them throughout the hiking season. It was a great way to look back on the summer months when winter hit.

This spring, we’re looking forward to expanding our outdoor experiences. We’ve already purchased a kiddie fishing pole, and we’re looking forward to test driving that… plus, our son finally has large enough hands for his own ball glove! Swing, batter, swing!