Something for the kids
Celebrate the balmier weather with a day of outdoor activities for your kids on Garden Day, Sunday, 11 October. These garden-inspired craft projects will keep them busy while connecting with nature on the cusp of summer. Garden Day is the ideal opportunity to clear your schedule and spend the day making memories in the garden with your little ones.
Make a bonnet with blooms
Help your kids make colourful bonnets with flowers perfect for a spring celebration. Let them find and pick their favourite flowers, help them play around and plan a design, and see them beam with pride when they put on their own creations.
You’ll need
- summer hat with a wide brim
- a length of wide ribbon in any colour
- florist wire, raffia, or twine
- fresh flowers from your garden
Steps
- Cut a variety of your favourite flowers, herbs, and twigs in different colours and sizes from your garden. Remember to leave a longer stem. Help your children handle the secateurs, they are very sharp!
- Play around with the flowers and greenery by making small bunches and arranging them in a row to find a design they like.
- Cut some stems shorter and leave others long to give the spring bonnet a whimsical look.
- Tie your flowers onto the ribbon with florist wire, raffia, or twine.
- Tie the ribbon with your flower design around an old summer hat with a wide brim to create a beautiful spring bonnet ideal for a Garden party.
Tag #GardenDaySA to share your works of art with us.
Create a flowery butterfly
Go on a treasure hunt around the garden to collect flowers in all shapes, sizes, and colours for this Garden Day-inspired butterfly project. Keep your little ones busy collecting, cutting, drawing, and sticking to create a beautiful work of art in celebration of spring.
You’ll need
- cardboard offcuts
- white paper and a marker or a printout of a butterfly
- a stick of glue
- flowers and twigs from the garden
- child-friendly scissors
- an assortment of bowls or containers
- a butterfly or bug outline, which you can download here:
- Snail image
- Butterfly image
- Bug image
Steps
- Collect flowers in all colours and sizes from the garden. Download Candide, a garden community app, to help the kids identify the different names of the flowers they collect. Candide is free for download in the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.
- Help your children cut the petals into various bowls. They will use the petals to decorate the butterfly wings.
- Use the blank paper and black marker and help your child draw the outline of a butterfly. Or find one online and print it out.
- Stick the paper onto a large enough cardboard offcut as a base.
- Help your children choose and stick the petals to decorate the wings in their own unique style.
- Use any left-over pieces of cardboard and create more flower patterns.
Tag #GardenDaySA to share your works of art with us.
For mom and dad
To inspire South Africans to celebrate all things green, Garden Day will host a number of virtual events in the run up to Sunday 11 October including flower crown making workshops, so that you can make your own flower crown, the ultimate Garden Day accessory. On the day the movement will host its first Virtual Garden Day Gathering with a host of events, including a Q&A session with garden guru Tanya Visser, a celebrity flower crown off with actor and comedian Schalk Bezuidenhout and radio and television presenter Zoë Brown, garden-inspired gourmet cooking and more via Zoom and Facebook Live. (Link to Garden Day Virtual Gathering programme)
Don’t forget to follow @GardenDaySA on Candide, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, and to share your celebrations on social media by tagging @GardenDaySA and using #GardenDaySA. https://gardenday.co.za/
