DLTK's Nursery Rhyme Activities
Daffodil Egg Carton Craft

Children under 4 can easily paint the cup for the daffodil, but the rest pretty much needs a child who's age 4 and up.

This is a great craft to do with the Mary, Mary Quite Contrary nursery rhyme, but it's also a nice spring craft.

Personally, my favorite use for it is as a bouquet of crafted daffodils in a hand decorated jar served with breakfast in bed (to me!) on Mother's Day *grin*.

Suggestion from Lisa:
"For the daffodil craft for younger children they could use a green straw taped to the flower instead of rolling up the paper for the stem!"
 

Materials you will need for the daffodil are

• an egg carton cup.  Cardboard works far better as poster paint won't stick to the styrofoam.  If you're using styrofoam, just leave the cup white.
• Yellow paint (if you chose to paint the cup)
• glue or tape
• green construction paper
• printer and white paper
• CARDBOARD ALTERNATIVE:
   
  • This is the alternative that we used.
  • Instead of printing out the color Templates, print out the black and white template and trace it onto a piece of cardboard.
  • Let the children use this cardboard template to trace the shapes onto colored construction paper.

Instructions:

• Print out the template of choice and cut out the template pieces (at this point you can use the cardboard alternative if you desire.
• Color or paint the template pieces as required.
• Take a whole sheet of construction paper and roll it as tight as you can into a tube
   
  • the kids won't be able to roll it too tightly...  That's ok, just have them do it as tight as they are able.
  • Oh, the look of concentration you'll see during this step...  You'd think they were performing brain surgery!
• Glue or tape the construction paper so it stays as a tube.  We found that tape worked better.
• Flatten and tape the end of the end of the tube so you have a surface to attach your flower to.
• Cut a single egg carton cup from the egg carton.  Trim the edges so they aren't jagged.
• Paint the egg carton cup yellow.
• Paint the inside too!

• Glue the petals to the flattened part of the green tube
• Glue the egg carton cup to the center of the petals
• Glue the leaves onto the tube toward the bottom of the "stem"  (if you'll be making a jar full of these as a bouquet, you'll want to put the leaves a bit higher up the stem).

Templates:

• Close the template window after printing to return to this screen.
• Set page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP or FILE, PRINTER SETUP in most browsers).

Template for colour printer

Template for black and white printer

Print friendly version of these instructions