Below you’ll find directions for making beautiful coffee filter art flowers with kids. I even have free printable templates for you to grab at the end of the post.
And I love teaching children, whether they’re kindergartners, preschoolers, or my own son.
How about you? If so, why not combine all three of these passions into one super fun science and art project? That’s what we’ve done with our spring coffee filter art.
These coffee filter flowers are one of my favorite art projects to do with kids. Of course, my son likes to say that I have a lot of favorite art and science activities, “like you have a lot of favorite books!” He’s got a point, but I digress.
When I first tried this with my preschoolers, I went in knowing they’d enjoy it. However, I couldn’t have predicted their level of interest!! We were practically drowning in beautiful flowers when we were done.
And over the years I’ve discovered that wasn’t a one-time deal. Every group of kids I’ve done this with has gotten into it so much that we ended up with tons of beautiful spring art. What a great problem to have!
In addition to the enjoyment factor, the children learned a lot about science, math, and art concepts along the way.
Materials Needed for Spring Coffee Filter Art
Coffee filters (I know . . . you were so surprised this one made the list 😉 ) Liquid watercolors (Discount School Supply or Sargent) Glass jars Eye droppers Wax paper (this is key!)
Using the school’s die-cut machine, I cut out a zillion flowers from a stack of coffee filters. Okay, so it probably wasn’t a zillion! I’m glad I was able to get my hands on a die-cut machine, as this project extended farther than I originally planned (meaning I had to go back a few times to make more coffee filter flowers)!
Hand-cutting the flowers wouldn’t have been difficult, though, just more time consuming. You can also have the kids free-hand cut their own flowers, or use a template to trace before cutting.
If you’d prefer, I made two flower templates you can print and use. They’re available at the bottom of this post.
Next up, squirt some liquid watercolors into a few containers. I used a variety of old glass jars I had on-hand. I’ve found that the glass jars work best for holding the liquid watercolors, as the jars are less prone to tipping over. Unless you’re like me and you knock them over, of course!
I highly recommend that you place down a piece of wax paper to serve as each child’s work space. With each child, I placed a piece of wax paper down and wrote his name on it with permanent marker. The wax paper helped contain any escaping watercolors and made it easier to take the coffee filter flowers over to our drying rack.
Show the kids how to use an eye dropper in case they need that instruction (or that reminder). I reviewed how to use an eye dropper with the children, just in case.
Then let those little art scientists at it!
I loved watching how each kid took on their coffee filter flowers.
Some children excitedly splatted large amounts of paint onto the coffee filters at first. This led to a great discussion of over-saturation versus saturation!
Once they’d experimented with over-saturating the flowers, the kiddos were much more intentional about dropping the paint sparingly. Well, unless they were enthusiastically experimenting with over-saturation!
Using the eye droppers, the children watched how the watercolors were absorbed by the coffee filter flowers.
The first year we did this, we ended up doing this experiment on and off for more than 5 days. Every successive year I’ve tried this with kids, I’ve made sure to plan extra time for the project.
We enjoyed exploring with different colors and types of liquid watercolors. This allowed us to see that some were absorbed much quicker than others. A few of the kids and I explored this in-depth, “racing” some of the colors on the flowers. We found that the glitter watercolors were absorbed a lot less quickly than the regular watercolors. We hypothesized it was because the glitter watercolors are thicker.
In addition to saturation and absorption, we delved into color theory a bit too. There were grand exclamations about making new colors by mixing some of the paints!
The concept that red and yellow make orange is so much more meaningful to a child when she’s making that discovery herself. The kids also noticed that the darker colors sometimes overtook the lighter colors.
Learning with Beautiful Spring Flower Coffee Filter Art
Here are some of the concepts we explored with this awesome science and art project:
Absorption
Color mixing
Saturation
Fine motor skills
Color identification
These coffee filter flowers look gorgeous displayed in the window.
We decided we liked the flowers better when they’re taped directly to the window, as the colors are brighter. That’s in comparison to placing the flowers on a piece of contact paper to display in the window.
I’ll be teaching PreK next year and I LOVE LOVE LOVE this!! I cannot wait to do this with my kiddos! We don’t have windows in our classroom, but there are windows in the hallway outside of our classroom and they will look amazing there!!!
I love this idea as it stipple for the little ones to do. I teach nursery and pre school and always looking for fun and simple crafts. Thanks for your creative ideas!
I do visit your visit when I need some activities to help my kids learn. Your posts are always useful for me. Many thanks for sharing such art and craft ideas.
This is maybe a silly question, but how do you stick them to your window? Scotch tape? I don’t see tape thru your flower. Just wondering how you got them to stick so well. That’s a lot of flowers to stick up so I bet you had a great method!
Not a silly question at all – I need to go back and add that into the post itself! We ended up just putting a piece of clear tape on the back and putting them up in the window that way. We tried using Contact paper, too, and that worked out okay but didn’t give us the same effect when the sun shone through the windows. Plus, with a single piece of tape, it was a lot easier to take the flowers down so the kids could bring them home or use them in other art projects (as long as I was careful removing the flowers from the window). Sorry I don’t have a better idea for you! 🙂
How did you get the colours to be so bright? When we did this the dye became see through and it made some of the kids sad that it didn’t transfer on the paper well enough. What’s the water to food dye ratio?
Hi, Britt! We didn’t use food dye for this. We used liquid watercolors (see the supply section of this post), and we didn’t dilute with any water. The colors were lovely! Because it’s done on coffee filters, the flowers do become somewhat see through (as you can tell by the photos) once they’re dried. But not overly so. Hope that helps!
how do i cut the coffee filters by hand? I don’t have anything else to cut them with.Also my mom used to cut out lots of kids all hooked together do you know how?
I’ve done it before where I just grabbed a stack of coffee filters and cut the flowers free-hand. I should look into making a template to add to this post. Oh I love what your mom was able to do. I haven’t done that in ages, so I’m not sure how best to describe how to do so.
Hi Kathleen! I just used a little bit of invisible tape, looped in on itself. And then I very carefully removed the tape when taking the flowers down so the kids could take them home. Hope that helps. 🙂
I haven’t tried it with tempera paint, but I don’t think it would work as well (since tempera tends to be thicker). If you try it out, please let me know how it worked!
I can’t wait to try this with my kids. As we are now homeschooling until school resumes I’m looking for art projects to keep things creative. As today is first day of spring, this will be a great project to do. Happy creating!
I’ll be teaching PreK next year and I LOVE LOVE LOVE this!! I cannot wait to do this with my kiddos! We don’t have windows in our classroom, but there are windows in the hallway outside of our classroom and they will look amazing there!!!
Thank you so much!! I’d love to see how they turned out! 🙂
I love this!!…. Do you have pics if the canvas art you did for mother’s day?
Thank you! It is definitely a favorite! Click here to read the post about the Mother’s Day gift we did (they were a hit with families and kids, alike).
The wax paper is a key tip! You’re brilliant (and such a fun teacher)!
And you’re just plain awesome! Thanks for the kind words, as always!!!!
This is such a cute idea! I love that it’s simple, but is one the my kids will still thoroughly enjoy!
Thanks for sharing 😉
Yes, sometimes simple is really the best! Thank you!!!
Would be fun to do in autumn with leaf die-cuts!
Definitely!
I love this idea as it stipple for the little ones to do. I teach nursery and pre school and always looking for fun and simple crafts. Thanks for your creative ideas!
Thanks so much for the kind words, Deanna!!
Can you use just regular children’s paint?
I’m not sure if it would work as well, honestly, but I haven’t tried it. Food coloring (maybe watered down a little) would be another option!
Hi Mary,
I do visit your visit when I need some activities to help my kids learn. Your posts are always useful for me. Many thanks for sharing such art and craft ideas.
Thank you so much for your kind words! 🙂
This is maybe a silly question, but how do you stick them to your window? Scotch tape? I don’t see tape thru your flower. Just wondering how you got them to stick so well. That’s a lot of flowers to stick up so I bet you had a great method!
Not a silly question at all – I need to go back and add that into the post itself! We ended up just putting a piece of clear tape on the back and putting them up in the window that way. We tried using Contact paper, too, and that worked out okay but didn’t give us the same effect when the sun shone through the windows. Plus, with a single piece of tape, it was a lot easier to take the flowers down so the kids could bring them home or use them in other art projects (as long as I was careful removing the flowers from the window). Sorry I don’t have a better idea for you! 🙂
I have used double stick tape for similar projects in the past. It can be a little difficult to remove but worth it!
That’s good to know! Maybe I’ll give that one a try next time. 🙂
How did you get the colours to be so bright? When we did this the dye became see through and it made some of the kids sad that it didn’t transfer on the paper well enough. What’s the water to food dye ratio?
Hi, Britt! We didn’t use food dye for this. We used liquid watercolors (see the supply section of this post), and we didn’t dilute with any water. The colors were lovely! Because it’s done on coffee filters, the flowers do become somewhat see through (as you can tell by the photos) once they’re dried. But not overly so. Hope that helps!
how do i cut the coffee filters by hand? I don’t have anything else to cut them with.Also my mom used to cut out lots of kids all hooked together do you know how?
I’ve done it before where I just grabbed a stack of coffee filters and cut the flowers free-hand. I should look into making a template to add to this post. Oh I love what your mom was able to do. I haven’t done that in ages, so I’m not sure how best to describe how to do so.
How do you stick them to the windows?
Hi Kathleen! I just used a little bit of invisible tape, looped in on itself. And then I very carefully removed the tape when taking the flowers down so the kids could take them home. Hope that helps. 🙂
Will liquid tempera paint work?
I haven’t tried it with tempera paint, but I don’t think it would work as well (since tempera tends to be thicker). If you try it out, please let me know how it worked!
I can’t wait to try this with my kids. As we are now homeschooling until school resumes I’m looking for art projects to keep things creative. As today is first day of spring, this will be a great project to do. Happy creating!
Oh I’m so happy to hear you’ll be trying this! Please let me know how it goes.
need coffee filter flower template
It’s at the bottom of the post under the heading “Free Printable Flower Template” – there’s a little form to fill out to get it sent to your email.