Spring Activities: Cress Heads - Red Ted Art

Cress Heads are such a CLASSIC Spring activity for kids – they are quick, easy and so so fun. Oh and they are quite inexpensive too!!! This is something you can do year in year out and kids will never tire of making their own Cress Head characters. In fact… you could have a competition each year and encourage the kids to come up with new weird and wonderful Cress Head designs.

These How to Grow Sprout Heads were first published in February 2014 and have been updated and republished for your convenience!

So… to make cress heads, you will need:

a packet of cress (you can get them here US/ UK) (Affiliate links)
some egg shells
cotton wool
some water

How to make Cress Heads:

We have a super cute and quick video for you to watch to towards the end of the post! Do take a look!

1) We have a birthday in the family at this time of year, so whilst baking birthday cakes, I carefully crack our eggs, so they are as “whole as possible”. You could of course carefully clean our your soft boiled breakfast egg too or save your eggs from your scrambled eggs to make these easy cress heads! I managed to collect 9.

2) Get the kids to decorate their egg shells. Encourage them to go crazy and have fun! We used marker pens for this. I love that Pip Squeak added a “beard” and moustache to hers and that Red Ted thought of adding rosy cheeks! They made four each and I made a sneaky one at the end too.

3) Stuff with cotton wool. We added 2 balls per egg. But maybe should have added a third.

4) Sprinkle your seeds and add a little water.

5) Place in a sunny place and watch.