What your Preschooler will Learn by Pressing Flowers and Leaves:

- The various parts of leaves

- The various parts of flowers

- How to dry flowers and leaves to preserve them for always

What you will Need for these Holiday Cards:

- Leaves and flowers

- A phone book or another heavy book

- Tissue paper or parchment paper

- Construction paper

- Glue

- Decorative items such as markers, glitter, crayons, paint, chalk etc.

What To Do:

Step one: Go for a walk with your preschooler and have them collect attractive leaves and flowers. If you're snowed in, go to a local indoor garden, hothouse or arboretum.

As your preschooler collects the flowers, point out the different parts—the petals, the anthers (the inside fuzzy looking bits,) the stigma (the vase shaped inside), the stem and any pollen. Point out that flowers start off as buds and over time gradually open into flowers. Teach your preschooler that flowers contain the tiny seeds that will grow new plants.

Explain the different parts of a leaf. Point out the blade (the main part of the leaf) and the veins. Teach your preschooler that leaves help the plant get sunlight and air that they need to grow big and strong.

Step two: After you and your preschooler have collected enough leaves and flowers, you'll want to press them between two pieces of tissue paper or parchment paper. You can put several leaves and flowers together to use the same piece of tissue paper, but try not to let the flowers and leaves touch.

Step three: Put your tissue paper between the pages of your heavy book. Leave your book alone for a week to ten days.

Step four: After a week or ten days, take your tissue paper out of the book. Your flowers and leaves should be perfectly dried out and ready for your holiday cards.

Step five: Have your preschooler glue the flowers and leaves onto your construction paper to make holiday cards. Have your preschooler decorate the homemade holiday cards with glitter, markers, crayons and whatever else your child wants.

Variations:

Don't feel you're limited to just pressing flowers and leaves to make holiday cards. Have your preschooler create homemade holiday gift tags for all those holiday presents you're handing out.

Hi! I'm Theresa Halvorsen, the preschool science and nature writer for Preschoolrock.com. I have twin boys and am blown away by their fascination with preschool science and how the world works around them. I am always looking for fun and simple science activities so preschoolers can learn about science and the natural world. Please contact me with any suggestions, ideas or questions you have about this site.

Helpful Tips for Parents

• Science fear is learned, not innate. Preschoolers approach science with natural confidence — protect that confidence by keeping science joyful and low-stakes.

• Give children real tools: a real magnifying glass, real measuring cups, a real thermometer. Toy versions deliver less sensory and intellectual feedback than actual instruments.

• Integrate science into daily routines: cooking (chemistry), gardening (biology), building (physics), weather watching (meteorology). A science-rich home requires no special equipment.

• Document seasonal science observations over months and years. A child who tracks the same tree across four seasons has done longitudinal observational science — genuinely impressive.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I build a child's science confidence when they get frustrated by unexpected results?

"Unexpected" is the word to use rather than "wrong" — in science, results that don't match predictions are the most interesting. "The result was different from what we expected — that means we discovered something! Let's figure out why." This reframe makes the unexpected result a success rather than a failure, because it produced a question worth investigating. Science confidence is built by treating all results as valid data, never as failure.

Related reading: See also our bubble experiments and our science experiments at home for more ideas on this topic.

🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 😌 Patience & Delayed Gratification — Experiments with delayed results — growing plants, watching crystals form, tracking weather — teach children to wait for outcomes rather than needing immediate feedback, a skill that predicts academic and life success.
• 🔄 Flexible Thinking — When an experiment produces an unexpected result, children practice adapting their thinking — a form of cognitive flexibility that makes them more resilient learners across all subjects.
• 🔬 Scientific Method — Even a simple experiment teaches the predict-test-observe cycle that is the foundation of scientific thinking — and preschoolers who internalize this process approach problems with genuine scientific confidence.
• ⚖️ Cause & Effect Understanding — Seeing that one action reliably produces a specific result builds the logical framework children use in mathematics, reading (one event causes another in stories), and everyday reasoning.

With this preschool plant activity, your preschooler can actually create homemade holiday cards. By pressing your own flowers and leaves and then creating holiday cards out of them, your preschooler can make a wonderful homemade holiday gift. You will also be creating an educational moment for your preschooler with this preschool plant activity.