Try this Pretty Coffee Filter Flower Craft in 7 Steps: Plus a Bonus Color Mixing Lesson

Coffee filter flower craft

Here is a project I used to do with my three to six-year-olds in the Montessori classroom. We used to do this coffee filter flower craft project for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. It is also a great project for Spring, Easter, a birthday, or for the parts of a flower lesson.

My daughter is two and a half, so she could not do all of the steps on her own. I will include all of the steps here and suggest different options that may work for your child, depending on age. We’ll do this project again next year and I’ll give an update on this post on how it works out, and if I discover any new tricks.

 

 

Color Mixing Lesson with the Coffee Filter Flower Craft

The first thing we did was a color mixing lesson with colored water with food coloring. While we were doing it, we read the book, Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh, which we borrowed from our Library.

Mouse Paint is a beautiful book for teaching about color mixing with primary colors to make secondary colors. I used this book when I was a Montessori classroom teacher to introduce color mixing as a small group lesson, but we used tempera paints.

With my daughter, we used mason jars and poured some colored water into the mason jars to watch the colors mix. We poured red water on top of yellow water and watched the water turn orange. This was a fun water pouring activity!

Another way we tried was getting a medicine dropper and we dropped red water on a coffee filter and then dropped blue water with a dropper on top of the same spot and saw it change to purple.

 

Decorating the Coffee Filters

After we finished up the color mixing lesson, we continued to decorate the coffee filters with colored water. Since my daughter is two-and-a-half, there was a lot of trial and error. She hasn’t mastered using a dropper yet, and she was mostly using the dropper like a paintbrush.

I got out big paintbrushes for her to try. She dipped the paintbrush into the colored water and it worked really well on the coffee filters.

You can use regular food coloring but I used performance food coloring for cake icing. The colors are more concentrated and vibrant. I added a lot of drops to make the colors vibrant on the coffee filters.

Note that food coloring may stain, so be sure to use an apron or old clothing, and something to protect your furniture. You could also find an alternative like kids washable watercolor paints or markers and add water if you prefer.

Making the Flowers

1. We let the coffee filters dry (a few hours). You’ll need 3 decorated coffee filters to make one flower with a green pipe cleaner as the stem.

 

2. Next, fold the three coffee filters like a fan. I use the language, “fold, flip over, fold, flip over…”

 

3. Bunch the three fan folded coffee filters together and hold in the middle.

 

4. Get your green pipe cleaner. Move your coffee filters towards the top of the pipe cleaner and wrap the top of the pipe cleaner around the coffee filters two or three times.

 

5. Open up the coffee filters and fluff them like flower petals. My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter was able to help a little with this part!

 

6. Push up the petals and wrap the pipe cleaner around the bottom part of the flower, to make the calyx or the green protective parts at the bottom of the flower.

 

7. You can put your completed coffee filter flowers in a little vase.

We used the mason jar as a vase from the color mixing lesson in the beginning. You could decorate the vase if you’d like to. If we decorate the vase, I’ll update that here, too.

This makes an adorable Valentine’s Day gift for the grandparents!

 

Concluding Thoughts

Keep in mind that in Montessori, you want your child to be able to do activities as independently as possible. So this project is kind of an exception. For the youngest children, 2, 3, and even 4 you will most likely do a lot of this project with your child.

• You may have to do many of the parts for your child, like folding and putting the flower together. It depends on your child and age.
• Your child could do other parts of the activity independently, like color mixing, freely decorating the coffee filters, and setting them aside to dry.

This activity has many Montessori elements that you can set up for your child to do separately and independently. For example, You can set up a color mixing tray with medicine dropper bottles filled with primary-colored water. Using a dropper with water (plain or colored) is a Practical Life lesson that is good for fine motor development and muscle control.

• Your child could use the droppers to mix the colors into a small container, or on coffee filters.
• Your child could empty the colored water into the sink and clean up the tray independently.
• Or your child could set aside the coffee filters to dry in a designated area. It depends on how you would like to set up the activity.

I will create a separate post on an independent color mixing tray in the future and link to it here.

What do you think of this Color mixing coffee filter flower activity? Did you try it at home? I’d love to know how it went. Leave a comment below!