Fall Art

 

 

Last week I chose two fall books from the library.  Of course I like to try to have all my projects connect around our letter of the week.  It wasn't too much of a stretch to say that our leaf projects were because tree starts with Tt.  I loved that our muffin tin meal theme was trees, leaves and harvest this week.
We read Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert.  I love the drawings of the leaves and the great detail of each individual leaf that she then takes and uses to form, not just a leaf man, but a wide variety of animals and other things as we join the author in wondering where the leaf man may have gone after it flew away.  You really need to check out this book to see how creative the author is.
We decided to make...what else? A Leaf Man. We gathered leaves last week, it was an added bonus that we were supposed to be collecting leaves to take back to story time today.  I placed them between layers of newspaper and flattened them with some books for a few days.  Unfortunately they were still quite brittle.  I know there is another way to do it because the older children did a leaf project years ago in school and I know the leaves weren't that brittle.  Here are the girls gluing their leaf men together.

I offered them the leaves and had them pick a head, a torso, legs and arms.  Then they reminded me the men needed hands.

We also read Fletcher and the Falling Leaves by Julia Rawlinson.  This story is about a sweet, young, caring fox, who is concerned when his friend the tree begins to change in the fall.  He is so concerned as the tree loses his leaves he tries to put them back on.  This story just tugged on my heart watching the lengths the fox would go to help his friend.

We decided to make fall leaves for our tree in the playroom.  We had made the tree with leaves and apples back in September (check out the lesson here) and I thought it was due time it changed for the season.

The girls paper towel painted (because I had no sponges) with crumpled paper towels held by clothespins.  

Then I cut them out when they were dry and the girls hung them on the tree and blowing off of the tree and in a pile under the tree.

The girls love both of these books and I would strongly recommend them.