MAKING LEAF ART WITH YOUR KIDDOS

Whoa what a school year this has turned out to be for all of our kiddos. I know that virtual learning can be a lot of screen time but it also means that we get to have a lot of creative fun time with our kids too.

While we are learning at home I’m trying to plan fun things to do for the older kids and also things that will keep daughter #4 busy too since we are doing pre-k at home instead of the traditional pre-k we’ve always done. Today we made art. And not just any art, we made people and animals with leaves and other nature items.

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And it was SO FUN!

We’ve done something similar before, painting with nature click here to see how fun that turned out. But today we didn’t break out any paints. We just used the colors (and the option for markers for faces) that we found in the things that God gave to our backyard.

The older girls actually enjoyed it way more than my pre-k girl did which completely surprised me. I figured they would think it was “baby-ish” but they fully enjoyed this crafty project.

Making leaf art with your kids

STEP 1

Gather pieces of nature. We took a small basket outside and filled it with all kind of things (I purposefully didn’t take a big basket out there because I knew they would fill it FULL lol! The small one was more than enough materials for them to create with)

• colorful leaves

• twigs

• some pine cone looking things

• blades of grass

• berries

• vines

• and whatever else the kiddos want to grab

STEP 2

Bring it inside and set up a place where the kids can get messy. We used our dining room table and since we weren’t painting I didn’t mess with putting a drop cloth down.

I brought out our metal bin of glues, squeeze glue bottles and glue sticks, washable markers for if they wanted to add faces or anything their imaginations could think of, kid friendly scissors, and copy paper.

STEP 3

I helped my preschooler at first, showing her how we could create a Thanksgiving Day turkey out of the leaves and although she thought that was really cool she just wanted to glue whatever, and most importantly wherever to her piece of paper.

We took a round leaf and glued it down first

Then we took longer more oblong looking leaves and glued them behind the round leaf for the Turkey feathers.

My pre-k girl wanted to use a piece of bark for the head so that’s what we used.

For the gobble we glued a small skinny leaf like thing down and pushed it up so it was under the bark head.

For the legs we just added a second stem from another leaf and glue it in place using a glue stick.

The most important step of all though is to just enjoy this crafty art time with your kids. Let them make a mess. Let them create. Let them make mistakes and not feel like they have to be perfect.

Here are a few finished leaf art pictures my girls made. I LOVE them! They were so creative and really took time to enjoy the whole process of this leaf art project. I can’t wait to do the next just for fun creative activity with them.