Recycled Egg Carton Flowers

This is a variation on my previous post of Recycled Flowers for Mother's Day.  My K students saw the flowers the older kids were making and wanted to make them but I wanted to do something different.  This is also a good project for talking about recycling and Earth Day. 

Materials:
Pipe Cleaners
Beads

Paper egg cartons- torn apart and prepped
Tissue paper of various colors cut to about 5 inches square

How to Make Your Flowers:
1. Prep the egg cartons by tearing them apart and punching a hole through the bottom center.  I use a needle tool to do this but a pencil would work too.

2. Thread the pipe cleaner up through the hole about half way.

3. Take 3-4 pieces of tissue paper and gently punch a hole in the center.  We use the pipe cleaner to do this.

4. Slide a bead onto the pipe cleaner

5. Then fold the pipe cleaner down over the bead.  I allow a good bit to be folded over that way the bead is visible.

6. Gently pull the pipe cleaner down and the center of the flower will be created. 

You could do many variations on this such as use buttons, or no beads or buttons.  You could add glitter by gently dipping the flower edges into glue and then into glitter. 

frontal view

side view