Create a botanical book

Step 1

Ask the children to bring back several branches, leaves or flowers from a nearby area.

You can also organise an outing to a nearby park or wood.

With the children helping, place the plants, leaves and flowers they have picked under stacks of books, which will flatten and preserve them (leave them to dry for a week).

Step 2

Download the PDF to get the template.

When the plants, leaves and flowers have sufficiently dried, print the different page templates using the PDF from this activity page onto some Canson^® "C" sheets of paper.

Then hand out the template pages to the children (a cover and several standard pages for each of them, depending on how much they collected).

Step 3

Ask the children to write their first name on the cover, then glue each branch or dried flower to the printed pages. Then help them by filling in the names of the plants in the label spaces provided.

For older children, why not ask them to do a search online or in books to find out what plant they have found and then fill in the labels.
"Plant name", "Scientific name", "Comments" (they can for example write down plants in the same family, or the fruit you get from this tree, etc.).

Step 4

Then hole punch the children's herbarium pages and suggest that they bind them with raffia, to create their first "botanical book"!