Flower Power: 3 Simple Lesson Ideas (+free worksheet)

They say April showers bring May flowers and while I experienced April almost-blizzards, I’m more than ready for those fragrant blooms. And since they don’t seem to be in a hurry, I’ve decided to bring them to the classroom using various flower-based activities. I prepared something for kids, teens and adults, so you can enjoy them with all your students – both online and offline!

Floriography for adults

Bro, do you even speak carnation? Neither do I, yet in the Victorian era, people often exchanged small talking bouquets, called nosegays or tussie-mussies, worn or carried as a fashion accessory. While I’m not encouraging you to ask your students to bring real flowers, you may introduce the language of flowers in the classroom – you will find the whole list of various plants and their symbols on Wikipedia (click!). You can encourage a nice discussion about the customary flowers we give on particular occasions and see that is all connected with floriography.

What is more, you can use a funny app Cryptofloricon that combines five most typical flowers: rose, lily, gerbera, chrysanthemum and carnation, in different ways to offer up different messages to the recipient. It’s like using emoticons, only far more stylish! For example: rose, chrysanth, chrysanth, chrysanth and gerbera mean I see what you did there!

Ask your students to think about their favourite flowers or the flowers they would like to give to various people in the group – that will spark an interesting activity.

Hey, teenager, write a poem!

Fine, you don’t believe teenagers can write poems. My students also didn’t believe me – and yet they wrote some real poems in less than 10 minutes! How? Check this lesson plan (click!) where I shared all the steps and materials I used in my classroom:

It’s been years since I introduced writing poems in my classes and I still find it one of my favourite activities – my students discover their hidden talents which is far more important than just learning English, isn’t it?

Flower Code for kids

If you teach kids, you know they like something funny, something crafty and something mysterious – and that’s why I came up with a flower code! It’s a very simple code where each letter is marked by a petal – there are four kinds of petals and seven colours to code a message around the centre of the flower.

To make decoding easier, it’s best to start the word with a leaf and move clockwise – then it will be really easy to read it!

I hope you will have a lot of fun with these activities – share with me your codes and poems!