Screen-Free Holiday Gifts Are the Must-Have 2020 Present and You Have to Check Out Crayola STEAM Paper Flower Science Kit!

This holiday season, screen-free gifts are at the tops of most parents’ and guardians’ gift lists.  With so many kids learning at home, kids are spending hours online everyday.  That’s why I was so excited to find the Crayola STEAM Paper Flower Science Kit.

It’s a fun and educational kit with everything kids need to create their own blooming paper flowers.  The kit combines science, technology, engineering, math and art for a hands-on, interactive and screen-free toy.  It’s not easy to find a toy that checks so many categories, but this one does!

What’s In the Box?

The Paper Flower Science Kit includes everything needed to create 12 paper flowers.  

In the box there are six flower pots, six flower pot covers, 12 petal sheets, 12 petal funnels, a watering can, a white crayon, a paintbrush, three ink bottles, three makers, 12 tips, color mixing chart and instructions.

Making the Flowers

Kids can make one flower at a time, or all twelve at once!  They can also re-wick their flowers to change the color of the petals, or add crayon or marker or even add drips from an ink bottle to make each petal and flower unique.  This is the art part of the kit.

First, kids layer four paper flowers on top of each other, largest on the bottom and smallest on top. Next kids bend their petals up, creating realistic-looking flowers. This is the engineering part of the kit.

The flowers are added to a wick and then placed on top of their pots. 

Water is added to the watering can, and each pot is watered.  This is a science lesson, learning that plants and flowers need water to survive.  

Now the real fun starts!  The kit comes with a guide to choosing flower colors.  For instance, to make say purple you need 10 drops of magenta ink and 10 drops of blue ink.  This is both a science and a math lesson.

My daughter just learned about primary and secondary colors in Kindergarten and now in First Grade she is learning about blending colors.  So this is a fun way for her to see the things she learns on a screen happen in real life, right in front of her eyes!

Once the ink is added to the water, the colors blend and slowly make their way up the wick to the paper flowers.  The color spreads from the inner portion of the flower to the outer portion, slowly but surely. At first the color is a bit lighter, but slowly becomes more vibrant as more color is wicked to the paper petals. This is a technology portion, showing how the wick transfers colors, and of course science as well.

STEAM Learning at Home

As kids engage with this educational kit, they learn about physics, capillary actions and water wicking.  Grayson just did another water wicking project in his Third Grade class where two cups of colored water transfer to a third cup of water that is a blend of the first two cup’s colors.  (And by the way, Crayola also makes a kit with this experiment called the STEAM Liquid Science Kit.  There are also tons of YouTube videos of people doing this experiment as well that we watched!).

The Paper Flower Science kit also helps kids learn about nature as I described above and helps them work on fine motor skills, math and my favorite skill for my kids to work on daily, problem-solving.

While this kit is geared for kits, even I was mesmerized when the colors in the flowers bloomed right in front of my eyes!  It’s such a satisfying thing to experience flowers blooming in a color that you chose and carefully counted out the correct number of ink drops to make happen.

Flowers can also “re-wick” color over and over to change the look of the flower. This allows kids to have fun experimenting with color and design, and stretching the enjoyment of the kit.

While you can make one flower at a time, or do all of the box in one afternoon, I found it easiest to do 6 flowers at a time.  We already had all of the supplies out, and it was fun to see how each variation in food coloring recipe impacts the ultimate color of the flower blooming.  

Once the flowers are dry, you can leave them in the pot and remove the excess water in the pot, or transfer them to a mason jar or other cup.  The flowers are absolutely gorgeous!  My kids have theirs sitting on their desks and dressers.

Every time they see them, they excitedly talk about how much fun they had making the flowers.  And of course they ask when they can make their remaining flowers bloom!

Great Holiday Gift Idea

This Paper Flower Science Kit is a great way to supplement remote learning or to provide a hands-on educational experience after school or on the weekends.  It’s also a perfect rainy-day activity or a great kit to take out when kids say those dreaded words, “I’m bored!”

It’s also very affordable, at under $20 per kit.  It makes a great birthday present, holiday present, or zoom birthday activity.  

Many of Harper and Grayson’s friends have done online zoom birthday parties.  The birthday child’s parent mails out a kit with some sweets, maybe a drink, and some activities they can all do together virtually on zoom. The Paper Flower Science Kit would really make a zoom birthday magical and fun!

As I mentioned earlier, the Crayola Paper Flower Science Kit is part of a line Crayola STEAM kits that include Space, Liquid, Silly Scents Wacky Dough Making, Paper Maker, Marker Maker (my daughter has this kit and loves it!), Build A Beast Dragonfly Kit, and Gross.  All of the Crayola STEAM Kits provide hours of education and fun, and allow your child’s creativity to flow while also learning!  

If you get a kit, let me know which one you get in a comment below!

*This post is sponsored by Crayola. All opinions and photos are my own.