Fall Fun

So I guess we have dropped off the face of the blogging world, at least for the last two months! This is in part due to the fact that we have been BUSY! Between hosting out-of-town family, Halloween, Rebecca's fourth birthday, and now Thanksgiving, we have been up to our ears in planning, cleaning, cooking, and everything else. What's more, I have decided not to try and stick to my one art project per week regimen and instead work toward less frequent but more extensive projects. The truth is that between preschool, story time at the library, and our Church's child care, my kids do lots of art without me, and instead of throw together a quick project before the week's deadline is up, I want to plan projects that are more involved and more meaningful. With the holidays upon us there will be no shortage of ideas and opportunities for art experiences to introduce to my kids, and I am excited to see what we come up with.

For now I will share a few pictures of crafts we made at Rebecca's fourth birthday.

It was a chilly afternoon party, so we went with a fall theme. This picture is a leaf book that the kids at the party put together. I ordered plastic leaf rubbing forms from Oriental Trading, and each kid was able to create a collection of leaf prints to take home.

Also from Oriental Trading,

this second picture is a cardstock leaf with a paint-covered design the kids could reveal by scratching the paint away with little wooden sticks. Some simply scratched designs in the paint, while others decided to scratch all the paint off.

Finally, the third picture shows two contact paper trees I cut out and stuck to the wall of our covered porch. Rebecca and Elliot and I went outside and gathered as many different leaves as we could and put them in baskets for the kids to press onto the sticky contact paper. We found that the green leaves stuck better those that had already dried out.