Four Seasons Crafts: Autumn Nature Tree

We love this time of year! If you haven’t noticed yet we have gone Autumn Craft Mad!!! We particularly love Autumn Crafts for Preschoolers, that they can enjoy and take part in. There are sooo many beautiful shapes and textures and colours out there at the moment: from Horse Chestnuts (aka conkers) to pine cones to the wonderful colours of Autumn Leaves.

I mean just take a look at this lovely photo. Makes my Autumn heart sing (yes, I get a bit mushy sometimes!!):

Beautiful! And these leaves came all from the same tree. It is a beautiful tree near our kids’ school. And it is WONDERFUL watching it gradually change colour.

Clearly, you can have lots of fun, just playing with the leaves – arranging them by colour and seeing what shapes you can create. But they are also PERFECT for finishing off this year’s Four Seasons Project. Those of you familiar with Red Ted Art, will know that each year we choose a “theme” and revisit that same theme throughout the four seasons… for some reason we always start with Winter and end with GLORIOUS AUTUMN!

This year’s theme as been NATURE – letting my kids connect with nature on a very direct way: let’s create tree pictures using nature to reflect what is happening. In Winter, we had sticks. In Spring, we had blossoms. In Summer, we had lush green leaves. And now… Autumn and our beautiful leaves.

Any one of these four seasons makes a lovely “stand alone” project, exploring nature and art. But of course, combined they look great too.

Here are our previous projects.

The four seasons in our first year, were made with Bubble Wrap and Finger prints.

Bubble wrap four seasons

The four seasons in our second year, focused on colours. We made easy “stained glass windows”.

Stained Glass four seasons

So, over to our Autumn trees. As with our previous projects, we collected sticks and leaves.

This time, I pressed the leaves A LITTLE, mainly because we collected them a week or so before we had a chance to do the art activity. And leaves do have a nature of curling up and getting brittle. If you make your Autumn Tree straight away, you will probably get away with NOT having to press them first.

1) As with our other Nature Trees, we started with the sticks to create our tree. To help, I squirt glue in a rough tree shape on the paper.

2) Then the children cut down the leaves, so that they could fit their trees and stuck these on too. Once done, added a little more PVA glue on the top, to help “seal” the leaves a little, so that the tree will keep better!