Painting leaves with feet, sponges and spray bottles.

Today we decided to have a day in crafting! This week we have been so busy getting out and about that it was a much needed day to stop and relax (well as much as you can with a 2 year old) the day was actually far from relaxing but was great! Therefore, I have a few activities to share with you all.

 The first few hours was spent outside playing and using our spray bottles! The idea was to get the outline of the leaves by using them.  However, this idea did not work for the desired outcome but we still had fun using the spray bottles and ended up with a very pretty piece of paper! The paper that we are using is wall paper lining brought from the £1 shop this is a wonderfully cheap alternative to the usually very expensive rolls of easel paper and much thicker.  The leaves were stuck down using masking tape folded back on itself.  I used this as the tape is not too sticky and does not damage the leaves when they are peeled off this way the leaves can be reused.

The next thing that we tried was sponge painting.  Little Boo was unsure about this to begin with but once I showed her what would happen she was really engaged and excited to see the results.  I have recently brought Little Boo the block paints that are in the picture.  I realised when she used these type of paints at a local craft day that it encouraged her to mix the colours and she loved doing it.  I then saw the paints in Wilkinsons for £2 and could not resist, she loves them! 

Now for the most fun activity painting with feet! Little Boo LOVES me painting her feet to do footprints and she loves to paint my feet as well. First of all we started off just doing footprints.  I then decided to try out the idea with the leaves and it worked.  Little Boo loved it as well.  I did join in as well and ended up having my feet painted and most of my legs! We did this activity in the kitchen this way I can just clean the tiles as it can get quite messy.

Little Boo peeling away the leaf she was so excited to see what it looked like . 

The finished picture was lovely and if you look you can see the outline of her little feet.  

More fun with leaves-Sticky Autumn picture

Little Boo loves playing with contact paper.  We have been using it for making since she was about six months.  I was really pleased to find the sticky back plastic vinyl in the pound shop as usually I pay a lot for it. Due to getting it cheap we were able to make a large picture using the easel to stick the sticky back plastic on to.

The idea was simple we just got all the leaves and the items that we collected out on a big tray I then let Little Boo stick whatever she wanted.  Due to Little Boo loving Tree Fu Tom at the moment we decided to colour in some pictures of him and the others from the program.  We then shrunk these by scanning them and reducing the size.  Little Boo enjoyed doing this as well as she loves using the computer. We used all the characters in the picture as they all live in the forest and Little Boo wanted to make a forest for them.

I hope that you can enjoy this idea it is so simple and really good fun. I have left our picture out and Little Boo keeps coming back to it to add more items.  When it is completed we will place another piece of contact over the top and some cardboard to make a frame.

Painting with items from our nature walk

To make use of those wonderful leaves and twigs and nature walk items I decided to do some painting with Little Boo using them.  She always gets really excited when I mention painting so this was a great hit which ended up being very messy.  It does not have to be messy but Little Boo decided that she also wanted to paint herself as well!

I realised when doing printing the less paint that you have the better.  Sometimes this is difficult with Little Boo as she is always keen to blob on loads of paint. So to overcome this I put the paint on a big tray then spread it thinly and did not get out the paint brushes. This worked effectively as it enabled us to mix the colours effectively.

Instead I made our own paint brush out of a twig and dried pine needles and which was really effective and looks like a mini broomstick. This made Little Boo laugh as we are reading Room on a Broom (Julia Donaldson) at the moment and she said that she was painting with her broom.

We used all the items we collected and it was interesting to see all the different prints that could be created with them.

We decided that we wanted to roll the conker across the page and watched as it made a paint trail.  The leaves we had worked OK but really we should have done this activity as soon as we had collected them or the day after as some were too dry to do an effective print with them.

We are out tomorrow and will be collecting more leaves as I have a few more ideas to try out and want to try the leaves when they are not so dry.  I am sure that Little Boo will not mind doing some more painting!

Nature tray (part two)

I just want to show you what we have been doing with the nature tray.  From our local toy library we have borrowed a light box this has been great fun to play with as the laminated leaves look amazing!

Little Boo had fun moving them around then started to make faces.

 Then to count items. We also discussed all the colours that she could see.

From the toy library we borrowed an easi-scope this is a computerised microscope which is handheld it it is amazing and so easy to install onto the computer.  It allows you to take magnified images of the items .  Little Boo enjoyed this but I think that older children may like the activity more. Little Boo found it more interesting to look at her own skin and finger prints which show up really well using the easi-scope.

Pine cone

pine cone

conker husk 

feather

fir tree

feather

sycamore tree seed 

leaf

Little Boo enjoyed feeling all the objects and we discussed how they felt. She loves to watch how the sycamore tree seeds fall and calls them helicopters!

 We are now in the process of trying out craft ideas using the leaves.  We have made a start with our paper bag owls and making faces with the leaves. However there will be more...