Autumn Trees

I hosted story hour at the coffee shop recently and the theme of the hour was leaves.  Usually, I read a few books and then we do a craft, but this time we mixed things up a bit.

I had prepared paper towel tubes by making a few cuts on both ends.  The children painted the tubes brown to look like trees and we left them to dry a bit while we enjoyed a few books.

I read, Fall Leaves Fall by Zoe Hall, Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert, and Count Down to Fall by Fran Hawk.  I recommend all three of these books.  They are great for fall.  The first two books both encourage using real leaves to create pictures, but we had a week of rainy weather so I decided to go a different route with the craft. 

After enjoying the books, the children glued the "trees" and some "leaves" to a piece of paper.  They also glued the "leaves" to the "branches" of the trees. 

Unfortunately, I forgot my camera this week.  It would have been nice to get a picture of all of the trees together.  I was so impressed with the trees made by three, four, and five year old children.  They all did a great job!  The tree in the photo above is the one R made.

The "leaves" we used for this craft came from Dollar Tree.  A bag of 150 leaves is only $1.00!  What a bargain!

Thank you to 1+1+1=1 for this fun and beautiful craft idea!