Keep your children gainfully occupied. Here's a great activity you can do with them anytime!

Are your children getting bored at home? Here's what you can do:

Take them for a walk in the neighbourhood park, and instruct your children to pick up some fallen fresh flowers and leaves. They could pick up an entire bunch.

When you reach home, separate the good flowers and roses from any dead, rotten or uninteresting pieces. Once you have a nice selection, pluck out the stems from the leaves and flowers.

Get hold of a fat, heavy, old book that you will not be reading. A phone directory will serve the purpose well. Alternatively, you could also use an old exercise book which is no longer required. However, a phone book is heavy and has more pages - so you will be able to press a larger number of flowers and leaves in them.

Place each flower or leaf separately between the pages of the phone directory. Make sure you leave a sufficient number of pages between each leaf or flower.

Keep this aside in a cool, dry place - perhaps your cupboard or bookshelf. It should preferably be kept in a place that is not accessible to sunlight. You could even place the phone directory under something heavy, to increase the 'press'. Keep the book aside for a week to ten days.

Once the flowers have been pressed and have dried, remove them from the phone book. You will now need some colourful chart paper or interesting handmade paper. Cut out the paper and fold once, so it takes the shape of a greeting card. Your child could then write out a greeting with a felt pen inside the card.

Using a thinner pen, perhaps a black micro tip, she should write down a little bit about the flower or the leaf on the back of the card.

Some interesting facts to include are:

• The name of the flower or leaf
• The plant or tree it grows on
• The season and climate the flower blooms in
• Where it was found (which park, which city)