Tuesday, October 5, 2010

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!

6 comments:

Jennifer said...

Oh great minds to think alike! LOL! I just did a project like this with the girls this past weekend! We added pumpkins to our little trees by recycling drink cup holders from McDonald's and egg cartons.

Carisa said...

Oooh, yours turned out cute!!! ;-)

Ticia said...

That is awesome, are they paper?

I got some fabric/silk leaves at the dollar spot one time and keep trying to decide what I'm going to do with them.

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

I love how your trees turned out - and what a great idea. We read all those books last year, and I agree with you - they are great.

An Almost Unschooling Mom said...

I bet they looked like a tiny forest, all sitting together - what a neat backdrop for your story time!

Anonymous said...

Pretty tree! We've been reading leaf man until I'm cross eyed...