Teaching Expertise

Sunflowers. A sign of Summer and sunny days.

This beautiful flower can brighten up anyone’s day and can also be an exciting teaching point when learning about life cycles and flowers. The following activities will hopefully inspire and delight your students! From fun crafts to worksheets and artwork, there is something for everyone to enjoy and learn from. 

1. Parts of a Plant

This labeling activity can be differentiated to suit a variety of learners’ needs. Learners will simply label the blank boxes with the correct words. Use this activity to consolidate learning and check student understanding after a unit. 

Learn More: Adanna Dill

2. Pasta Flowers

Simple, yet effective; making sunflowers from everyday kitchen staples will be a sure way to create a fun Summer craft with your children. This requires minimal prep time and just some pasta shapes, pipe cleaners, and paint. 

Learn More: Crafty Morning

3. Paper Plate Sunflowers

That ever-trusty and useful paper plate has come in handy once again. With the addition of some tissue paper, a card, and some glitter glue, you can help your learners make a decorative sunflower to brighten up your classroom!

Learn More: Glued to my Crafts

4. Craft with Kindness

This craft is a lovely activity to complete with any age learner. There is an easy-to-download template and all you need is some colored cards, scissors, and a black marker to construct your flower. On each petal, your students can write what they are thankful for, what kindness means, or how they will show empathy to others.  

Learn More: Crafting Jeannie.com

5. Sunflower Wordsearch

One for the older students; this activity will help learners cover biological key terms linked to sunflowers and other flora. Additionally, it’s a competitive game to play against classmates. This worksheet is decorated well and is eye-catchy to keep learners even more engaged.

Learn More: Puzzles to Play

6. Sunflower from Sticks

This fun craft uses popsicle sticks to create the sunflower’s petals around a cardboard circle. When complete and dry, your children can have a go at painting their sunflowers in pretty Summer colors. As the article suggests, a great idea would be to plant your finished sunflowers in the garden to brighten up those flower beds! 

Learn More: Boy Mama Teacher Mama

7. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers

For older learners, learning about brush strokes, tone, and famous artists is a must-do for any art curriculum. This YouTube video will explore how to draw Van Gogh’s famous ‘Sunflowers’ piece. These can then be decorated in a range of mixed media. 

Learn More: Art Lady Channel

8. Educate Through Nature

The following website has some great ideas on how to scientifically teach sunflowers through a range of different activities. Buy some sunflowers, and have a go at observing and dissecting them into various parts whilst drawing a scientific diagram of each section.

Learn More: Nature Inspired Learning

9. Ad Lib Game

This worksheet presents a whole range of sunflower facts, but with a twist! There are several words missing and it’s your learner’s job to come up with some creative words to make the passage make sense. It’s a great way to check students’ knowledge of literacy techniques along with emotions, numbers, and colors.

Learn More: WooJr.com

9. Grow a Sunflower

A great practical, hands-on activity. Your children can grow a sunflower using this straightforward guide. It also includes information on how to care for your sunflower too. Why not encourage your children to measure the growth of their sunflower each day and draw a small sketch to understand the life cycle too?

Learn More: Kids Do Gardening

11. Count with Sunflowers

For a mathematical sunflower theme, this printable addition and subtraction activity will encourage your students to practice their counting skills in this fun matching game. This can be adapted for a range of students depending on your learner’s needs. We suggest printing on the card and laminating it for future lessons!

Learn More: A Dab of Glue Will Do

12. Color by Number

Another math-themed sunflower activity and a sure crowd-pleaser for the younger students. This great color-by-number activity will have your students practicing spelling and color recognition whilst matching up the correct colors with the numbers.

Learn More: Coloringonly.com

13. A Tissue, A Tissue

Eye-catching and easy to make, these beautiful tissue paper sunflowers are the perfect rainy day activity. There’s a template to use or have your children draw one. Simply scrunch up bits of tissue paper and glue them down into a sunflower shape. The finished pieces can be mounted onto a card as a gift or simply pinned up for display. 

Learn More: Kids Activities

14.Candle Holders

This a great gift idea and perfect if you have a little more time on your hands. These salt dough creations are molded into sunflower shapes, baked, and painted to create an eye-catching candle holder for tea lights. Salt dough is a simple recipe using salt, flour, and water, mixed together to form a firm dough.

Learn More: Learning and Exploring Through Play

15. How To Draw a Sunflower

For all those creative and artistic students out there, who love to have a go at drawing their own! This simple visual, step-by-step guide shows how to create bold and bright sunflowers in 6 easy steps!

Learn More: SCYAP

16. Sunflower Counting

Another counting activity has made the list, suitable for pre-schoolers or kindergarten when matching up numbers. They are required to count the flowers and match up the number with a line to the correct picture. A fun mathematical activity!

Learn More: Kidpid.com

17. Egg Box Crafts

Need to use up those old egg boxes? Turn them into sunflowers! With this engaging craft, idea cut your egg boxes into flower petals, add a tissue paper center for the seeds, and some green card stems and leaves, and you have your very own 3D sunflower! 

Learn More: Buggy and Buddy

18. Wonderful Wreaths

This activity will require a little more prep and careful hands so we recommend it for older children. Using felt and coffee beans and a hot glue gun, carefully cut out a range of sunflower petals from felt and construct a stunning wreath to be hung from any door in the house. This activity is written in easily readable chunks to make the process simple!

Learn More: The Creative Imperative

19. Perfect Paper Cups

Another activity using all the resources we have available in the classroom or at home. Using paper cups, simply cut and fold using the instructions provided to make your 3D paper cup sunflowers. You can choose to paint them afterward to make them even bolder!

Learn More: DIY ART PINS