sunflower up cycled cardboard craft

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It’s what sunflowers do.” ~Helen Keller

Sunflowers mark the end of summer and beginning of fall as this is when they are in full bloom. They are apparently easy to grow although I have yet to try it myself. Today I am sharing a fun and easy sunflower up cycled cardboard craft. My 3 year old enjoyed learning about the basics of sunflowers while doing a hands on learning activity. Scroll to the end for your free PRINTABLES and a step by step tutorial on how I made this.

Fun facts:

-They typically take about 120-180 days to grow into a full flower.

-They need lots of sunlight 6-8 hours a day and lots of water.

-The typical sunflower life cycle: planting the seed, germination, seedling/leaf/plant, growing bug, flower, pollination, seed development, and harvesting.

-Can self pollinate

What You’ll Need:

Cardboard

1 Paper Towel Roll

1 Toilet Paper Roll

Hot Glue Gun and glue sticks

Pencil

Scissors

Small items to fill in the sunflower (I used pumpkin seeds, coffee beans and mung beans)

What To Do:

Step 1

Cut out a piece of cardboard about 10” by 12”.

Measure out 1” strips on your paper towel roll and cut. I ended up with 11 pieces.

Step 2

Hot glue your paper towel petals into a flower shape.

Measure out 1” strip along the length of your toilet paper roll and cut 2 pieces.

Step 3

Hot glue down the 1” strips to create the first part of your stem.

Step 1

Measure out 1” by 2” with the remaining toilet paper roll.

Hot glue down to connect to the stem to create a leaf.

Measure and cut out 1” strip to connect to the stem..

Hot glue down to connect and finish the stem.

Step 2

Fill in the parts of the sunflower with different small items! I used yellow mung beans, coffee beans, and raw pumpkin seeds. Those were the small food items I had on hand but other ideas could be corn kernels, black beans, and green peas.

This was a quick and easy craft to make! I love up cycling to reuse items I have already rather than go buy more craft supplies. My 3 year old isn’t ready for the cutting and gluing but he had lots of fun learning about the basic parts of a sunflower, filling, sorting and coloring.

I created a simple printable so we could review the basic parts of a sunflower. You can download your copy by clicking here – Parts of a sunflower .

I also created a coloring sheet for him to try coloring in a picture of a sunflower. You can download your copy by clicking here – Sunflower coloring sheet