Coloured Paper Spring Flowers

2009 Year 3 flowers

The Lesson:

Each year my town celebrates a flower festival.  To mark this occasion, I sometimes spend an art lesson creating paper flowers to decorate the classroom.

Lesson Steps:

1.  Show the students a vast range of flowers, including real flowers and photos of flowers.  Try to include flowers with a wide range of colours, shapes, sizes and styles.
2.  Demonstrate how to draw some basic flower shapes, discussing the construction of flower petals and stems and how this relates to drawing them.
3.  Ask the children to practise drawing different flower designs on scrap paper.  I always encourage the students to try drawing some real flowers and some imagined ones.  The children are always given the choice of whether to have more creative and/or simplified flower designs, or whether to have more realistic, intricate flower designs. 
4.  Talk about the colours of flowers, including the colours of real flowers and colours that may work well together on their imagined flowers.
5.  Look at constrasting colours against each other (e.g. red on blue) as well as similar colours against each other (e.g. yellow on orange), and ask the children to share their personal preferences with the class.
6.  Demonstrate how to copy/trace their flower designs onto coloured Brenex paper and how to cut the pieces out and glue them together.
7.  Ask the children to pick their best few flower designs and to begin construction!



Year 3 flower designs, 2009