Dye Flowers

Above: Starting the craft
Below: Ending the craft

Now for the fun blogging. The school stuff was fun, but not done with toddlers, which obviously would make it more fun. I implemented a schedule for my kids to follow when things got a little too chaotic. This schedule includes crafting time, so everyday I find or reinvent some craft for them to do. I actually do a lot of things I did in school, but I modify it for toddlers. (Hence the title: Ag Teacher to Ag Mom.)

This craft is dyeing flowers or veggies. My boys started with celery, and then we moved to flowers. The celery is pretty easy, and most people are familiar with it. We took glasses and filled them with room temperature water. Fill the glasses with approximately the same amount of water, so the kids can see which stalks of celery drank the most water. My kids added ten drops of food coloring. It was good for their counting skills, and it stopped them from squirting the entire bottle into the water. Well kind of, my 2 year old stopped at 6 drops and then had a giant squirt. We then used chop sticks to stir the water, which was more for them to play with. We cut stalks of celery off and added it to the water. The toddlers did use butter knives to cut the celery. We left the leaves on the celery, so they would show color too. After a day, viola, you get different colored celery. Eating different colored celery is fun, and they can see the "veins" of the celery that drank the water.

We did this same technique with freshly cut daffodils. We took it one step further by splitting the stem in half and adding each half to a different colored glass of water. It colored the daffodil two different colors, one color on each side of the flower.

Blue tipped daffodil after 12 hours

Hint: the fresher the flower or veggie the more water it will take up. The more water it takes up, the more color will show.

You can't really see the red,
but you can clearly see
the color split.