This time of year the girls are so excited to see all the flowers bloom around us. Since we try not to pick flowers off living plants, they eagerly search for fallen blooms they can have. To give them a chance to “pick” their own flowers, we created this fun ABC game. It’s a hands-on way to practice letter recognition and sounds as well as a great opportunity to take learning outdoors.
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I purchased a couple bunches of colorful flowers from Dollar Tree for this activity. Then I used wire cutters to cut the bunches into individual flowers. Using Sharpie markers I wrote the upper and lowercase letters on each of the flowers. I chose to use colors close to the color of the flower instead of black in case we wanted to use the flowers for another activity or craft in the future. Black would be a little easier to see but the girls had no trouble viewing the letters.
To setup the activity we took our flowers and a vase outdoors. Tinker wanted to “plant” the garden so she poked all of the flowers into the ground. You could set this up in a variety of ways. She did them in random order. If you had a large space and wanted kids to go in order, you could spread the flowers out in a zig zag (or similar) pattern and put them in the ground in ABC order so they gathered them and said the letters that way.
Once she had planted her garden, Tinker was ready to do some flower picking. She picked them at random, just as she had planted them. As she did she told me the letter and also tried to say the sound each letter represents.
Then she added the flower to our vase and picked a new one.
When she was done she had a bright, beautiful bouquet of ABC flowers. And she couldn’t resist stopping for a minute to smell the flowers.
Rainy outside? No worries! Tinker enjoyed hiding the ABC flowers around our house and finding them just as much as she liked the outdoor garden version. Do what works best for your kids!
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