Sunflower Fine Motor Play

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Working on fine motor skills and encouraging pretend play, this is the perfect activity to do with your sunflowers at the end of the summer.

Sunflower fine motor play

Did you grow sunflowers with your kids this year? We did and we have had a bumper crop. Our tallest sunflower measured 2.25m (our tallest sunflower to date). But unfortunately a big summer storm blew them all down this week (the perils of living by the sea).

We have one sunflower head hanging upside down in the shed, so that we can collect the seeds for next year once it has dried out.  It felt such a waste to just toss the other sunflower heads into the bin, so we used them in a fun late summer fine motor skills activity.

Sunflower Fine Motor Play

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Supplies

Using fine motor skills tweezers to remove sunflower seeds

I laid out the supplies and invited my daughter (aged 4) to play with them. We are doing lots of work on her fine motor skills right now in preparation for her starting school after the summer holidays. She already has a fierce imagination, so it wasn’t long before she was telling me all about the “Sunflower Cakes” she was going to bake for us to eat.

She busied herself plucking the petals from the sunflower with her handy tweezers. But they weren’t coming off fast enough for her, so she ditched them in favour of her fingers and soon had a bowl full of sunflower petals to play with.

sunflower water play activity for kids

She added her “ingredients” into her mixing bowl before pouring over a generous portion of water. All the time chatting away about what she was doing in her kitchen and wondering where she was going to bake her cakes.

The next job was to give everything a very thorough mix together with her spoons and whisk. She loves to help me in the kitchen, so she knows how important it is to combine all of the ingredients together to make a good cake.

She then poured her mixture into the muffin tray using her ladle and picked up the bowl to make sure she got every last bit out. (Thankfully she didn’t ask to lick the bowl out).

Making sunflower soup

“But hey mum, muffins need sprinkles on them,” Bella

And we had just the thing right at hand. We used the tweezers (and fingers) again to go deep into our sunflowers head, to dig out some of the seeds. These were just perfect for “Sunflower cake” sprinkles.

Sunflower Fine Motor Water Play Activity

What other uses have you found for your sunflowers once they have finished? We might have a go at the Smiling Sunflower Faces next year.

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