Create Felt Button Flowers for Preschoolers to Explore

Introduce this activity by showing how different types of flowers can be made by using different colours and sizes of petal cut-outs and how each flower can be put into a flowerpot (container) one by one to create a colourful bouquet!
Ox & Owl Literacy

These simple and colourful felt button flowers are easy and inexpensive to make. They make a great busy bag activity for preschoolers that you can take in the car, to a restaurant, doctor’s appointment, or another time when you need a few minutes to keep your little one quietly distracted.

These felt button flowers also help build your child’s fine motor control and dexterity, needed for a host of everyday activities and life skills, from dressing, writing, and fastening fasteners, to using scissors, and constructing.

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5 Early Literacy Activities Using Colourful Felt Button Flowers

These colourful felt button flowers are super versatile. They’re a perfect activity to pair with early numeracy activities.

You can combine these felt flowers with various spring and summer reading material, or pair them with number and colour cards, to help your little preschooler expand their vocabulary and language skills and learn early numeracy (foundational math concepts).

They are also a perfect activity for helping develop your child’s pincer grasp and other fine motor skills, alongside getting practice with the specific skill of buttoning.

To get started, check out the activities below.

1. Counting Felt Button Flower Activity

A pile of felt flowers and number cards beside them.

Use these flowers to help build your preschooler’s number recognition and counting skills.

Simply combine this activity with number cards 1-10 and have your child go through each card and add the correct number of flowers to the flower pot (container) to represent the number on each number card.

You might practice counting forwards from 1-10 adding a flower each time you replace the number card with the next number higher, and then also practice counting backward from 10, taking out a flower as you replace the number card with the next number lower.

Alongside practicing numbers and counting, your child will be able to visually see how the bouquet becomes more full as you add more flowers and less full as you take them away.

Depending on what colours you use, you might even introduce how colours have different shades and create monochrome felt flower creations.

You can also choose to limit the colours options to only three colours and then show how different flowers can be made simply depending on the order of the colours being chosen for each flower.

2. Colour Practice Using Felt Button Flowers

Practice colour recognition, colour matching, and comparing different combinations of colours.

Similar, to the number recognition and counting activity above, you can combine these flowers with colour cards and have your child create flowers to match the colours on the cards.

Depending on what colours you use, you might even introduce how colours have different shades and create monochrome felt flower creations.

You can also limit the number to only three colour options and then show how different flowers can be made simply depending on the order of the colours chosen to create each flower.

3. Size Recognition and Sorting Activity

Try comparison tasks to show how flowers will look different if you use the larger petal cut-out pieces on top of the smaller petal cut-out pieces as opposed to the smaller petal cut-outs on top of the larger ones.

You can also introduce your child to concepts around size by having him/her sort the sizes of the petal cut-outs into piles of small, medium, and large using little containers or baskets.

For the love of literacy, explore more blog posts!

4. Flower Shop Pretend Play

Use these felt flowers for pretend play!
Pretend play (imaginative play) holds countless benefits for children’s development. Your child could have a flower stand or shop and pretend to sell flowers.

5. Pair Them with Other Spring & Summer Learning Activities

These felt flowers are perfect to pair together with books about spring, planting, types of flowers, flower anatomy, seeds, or even flower art.

15 Excellent Children’s Picture Books to Pair with These Felt Flowers:

Flowers are Calling by Rita Gray
Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert
Lola Plants a Garden by Juta Hipuesch
Flip, Float, Fly: Seeds on the Move by Joann Early Macken
The Curious Garden by Peter Brown
Sun Flower Lion by Kevin Henkes
If you Hold a Seed by Ella MacKay
Bloom: An Ode to Spring by Deborah Diesen
Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner
What Does Bunny See? By Linda Sue Park
An ABC of Flowers by Jutta Hilpuesch
When Spring Comes by Kevin Henkes and Laura Dronzek
Muncha! Muncha! Muncha! By Candace Fleming
Sunflower House by Eve Bunting
The Digger and the Flower by Joseph Kuefler

How to Make Colourful Felt Button Flowers

These felt button flowers are easy and versatile. They can be used for imaginative play, as a busy bag activity, or as a teaching tool for a more structured activity that helps your child learn their colours, numbers, sizes, and other early math concepts

Materials You Will Need:

Materials to make felt flowers lined up horizontally on a table

Colourful felt
Assorted medium buttons
10 craft sticks
40 pipe cleaners
Flower stencils or template (I simply printed out flower shapes of various sizes and used these to trace my felt flowers out)
Scissors
Hot glue gun and glue
Paper cup, container, or small plant pot to hold the felt button flowers (optional)
Number cards 1-10 (optional)

Instructions in 5 Easy Steps:

Yellow felt fabric folded over with flower template also folded over to be cut out

Colourful felt flower petals grouped on a table in the shape of a heart

Step 1: Use the stencil or template to cut out 20-28 different-sized felt flower petal cut-outs. After you are finished, plug in your hot glue gun.

Tip: I folded my template in half and folded the felt over to reduce the amount of cutting and create more symmetrical flowers.

Pipe cleaner being threaded through button

Dollop of glue on bottom center of pipe cleaner wound together

Step 2: Next, take a pipe cleaner, and from the bottom side, push it through one of the button’s holes. Then, from the top side, push the pipe cleaner through a different hole just as you would do when sewing on a button. Twist the two parts of the pipe cleaner together to secure the button on the underside.

Add a small drop of glue at the center of where the pipe cleaner was twisted together and place the tip of the craft stick onto the glue.

First pipe cleaner wraped around craft stick

Step 3: Glue down the top section of one of the pipe cleaners along the length of the craft stick, then tightly wrap the other pipe cleaner around the craft stick, hiding the craft stick in a cozy blanket of pipe cleaner fuzz as you wind downwards.

You will not get very far down the craft stick with the first pipe cleaner. You will need to wind another pipe cleaner around the craft stick, starting from where the first pipe cleaner left off. Continue to add pipe cleaners until the whole craft stick is covered. Each of my flower stems took 4 pipe cleaners.

You should now have a nice soft flower stem with a button on top acting as the disc flower (center of the flower).

Step 4: Time to add the petals. Fold the felt flower cut-outs in half and cut a small slit in the seam, creating just enough room to be able to slip the button through the small opening.

One or more felt flower petal cut-outs can be added to each stem, they can be one colour or multicolored.

STEP 5: Repeat the process till you have 10 flowers in total. The beauty of this project is that these flowers don’t need to be perfect and still look and work great!

Your little flower creations are now complete and ready to be shown to your little one. Introduce this activity by showing how different types of flowers can be made by using different colours and sizes of petal cut-outs and how each flower can be put in the flowerpot (container) one by one to create a colourful felt flower bouquet!

Colourful bouquet of felt button flowers seen from above angle

Use these felt flowers to create a hands-on literacy sorting activity, where kids can practice their numbers and counting, their colours, and/or size differentiation.

WARNING: This activity uses small pieces, namely buttons. Young children should be monitored when given anything with small pieces as these can be a choking hazard.

NOTE: These flowers work great kept simple, but if you have a sewing machine and want to make them a little thicker, more detailed, and extra durable, you can certainly sew them.