Materials:
- The bottom portion of an egg carton
- Green pipe cleaners
- Scissors
- Yellow and white paint as needed
- Dowel or chopstick (optional)
Background Information
Spring-flowering bulbs are some of the most beloved plants of all time, including favorites like tulips, daffodils, paperwhites, and hyacinths. Blooming throughout the spring months, these special plants produce bright, cheery, and often fragrant flowers that signal the end of winter and herald the return of warmer weather.
The term “bulb” is used loosely by gardeners to describe plants growing from an underground mass of food storage tissues. Bulbs store enough food to enable them to grow and flower with no additional nutrients during the first year. To help kids relate to this concept, tell them the storage tissue is like the bulb’s lunch box—a big lunch box packed with enough food for the whole growing season! (Check out Bulb Botany if you want more details on bulb structure.)
Instructions
Discuss spring bulbs with kids using the above background information and allow them to view a photo of daffodils and their bulbs or bring some in for them to observe.
ASK: What do you notice about the form of the flowers? How many petals do they have? Share that daffodils have six sepal petals and a central corona in the center of the flower.
Launch the egg carton daffodil craft by modeling the process and passing out materials to each child. Celebrate the fact that we can upcycle things we already have on hand, like egg cartons, into arts and crafts materials!
Depending on the age of the children, you may want to do the cutting and hole poking beforehand, allowing younger kids to paint and string the flowers.
Keep in mind that for every dozen-sized egg carton, you can only make five daffodils, and for every 18-sized carton, you can make ten due to the available spacing cones. However, the remaining cups can still be made into spring flowers!
- Cut the cones and an equal number of cups off the bottom portion of an egg carton, taking care to keep the walls of both intact. By cutting along the base of the cones in a circular path, you can remove them without crushing the cone's structure.
- Cut along the edges of the cup so that the walls are as close to equal height as possible and have a clean, straight edge. Cut the base of the cones so they also have a clean, straight edge. Then, cut five narrow, evenly spaced wedges into the cup down to the base, remove them, and gently press the “petals” down so the cup is now a flat flower shape with six petals. Clean up the edges of the petals as needed with scissors.
- Using scissor tips, wooden dowels, or a chopstick, gently rotate a point back and forth against the cardboard to poke four holes: two parallel in the center of the flower no more than a centimeter apart and two directly across from each other on two opposite sides of the tip of the cone.
- Paint the egg carton pieces any combination of yellow, gold, and white that you choose! Some egg brands now use yellow cardboard for their cartons. If you have access to these, no paint is necessary!
- Once the paint is dried, thread a green pipe cleaner up through one hole of the flower, across through both holes of the cone, and back down into the flower. Pull gently until the cone is flush against the flower, then wind the excess pipe cleaner onto the “stem” portion.
- You can use your egg-carton daffodils as décor, gifts, and more! Try gluing on paper leaves, making a whole bouquet, or stringing them together into a garland.
