Fall Tree Craft

This tree craft was our final "Fall" themed activity for the week. It was so easy and turned out surprisingly really cute! It kind of uses the same concept I did with the Fall Tree Cupcakes, only with paper. :) And it's similar to the Fall Circle Tree craft we made last year, just with smaller circles!

Prep Work: (you can do this, or you can have your child do it--I did this stuff first)

• Get out a sheet of paper and draw a brown tree trunk and bare branches on it with a crayon.
• Get out several scraps of construction paper in different fall colors and fold them up several times.
• Use a hole-puncher and punch holes into the folded papers. Catch them in a bowl or bag or something.

Here's what you do:

• Sit down with your child and let them put glue all over the branches of the tree. They can even put some strips of glue coming down from the tree and on the ground--like falling leaves.
• Then have them "sprinkle" the hole-punch circles all over the picture.

• When all the circles have been sprinkled, pick up the picture and shake it a bit over the bowl to catch any circles that did not stick. Keep sprinkling until all or most of the circles stick.

Fall Leaf Match

To go along with our "Fall" Preschool Theme, we did this easy-to-make Leaf-Matching activity!

Prep Work:

• Get out sheets of craft foam in different colors of fall.
• Use a leaf-shaped cookie cutter and press it onto the foam. When you lift it up, you'll see the outline of the shape clearly and can easily cut it out without having the trace the shape! You can use this technique with ANY cookie cutters you have to easily "trace" any shape you want onto foam--then cut them out and use in various crafts and activities:

• I cut out 5 leaf shapes in brown, red, green, orange, yellow and tan:

• Next, just cut them right down the middle! Like so:

Here's how you play:

• Lay out all the leaf pieces on the table or floor. 

• Then have your child put the matching leaf pieces together! And when they're done, you can tell them good job, then all make like a tree and "leaf." :) The End.

Fall Tree Cupcakes

I hosted a bookclub at my house last week and our book was about a little southern town named after a tree. I decided to make these cupcakes with fall trees on them for bookclub, and the left over ones went right along with our "Fall" Preschool Theme!

2 birds. 1 stone. That's how I roll. :)

They turned out really cool and were SO easy to make! I'm tellin' ya.

• I just made red velvet cupcakes (box mix) and put on some vanilla frosting (canned)
• Then I melted some chocolate and put it into a ziploc baggie. (The easiest way to put chocolate or frosting into a baggie for piping is to put the baggie in a cup or bowl and unfold the bag around the edges of the cup so you just have to plop it in without making a mess.) :)
• I let the chocolate cool a bit in the baggie so it didn't come out runny.
• So after it cooled a bit, I cut off the corner of the baggie and piped the chocolate onto a cookie sheet. (Use a liner or parchment paper so it doesn't stick). I piped the chocolate into tree trunks with bare branches. I also made the end of the trunks kind of pointy so they were easier to poke into the cupcakes.
• I did about 4 tree shapes at a time--before the chocolate could set too much, I sprinkled colored sprinkles over the bare branches to look like fall leaves. (Except for blue, of course. I just used a bunch of colorful sprinkles I had and MOST of the colors were fall-ish. But I was too lazy to pick out all the blue ones, so there you go.) :)

They looked kind of haphazard when I first piped them, but that's ok! Each tree was unique, and when they dried, the piped chocolate even made the tree trunks look bumpy & textured like a real tree would be.

 Pretty cool, eh?

So, once they dried, I took one tree at a time and poked it into one of the frosted cupcakes, like so:

And voila! Fall Tree Cupcakes for all to enjoy! 

Corn Collage

LM made this at Library Storytime last week. 

All you need is a corn shape cut out of cardstock & pieces of any kind of paper you want/have on hand. (Ours was a mix of tissue-paper and other textures).

Just let the kids glue & stick!

Leaf Collection Book

Since it's fall, there are leaves all over our backyard. We went out one day, each with a brown paper bag, and collected different kinds of leaves.

When we came back inside, I made simple books for the boys using white printer paper folded in half, with a piece of construction paper fold in half on top as the cover. I stapled them together on the edge and the boys decorated the covers with crayons. Then they glued their favorite leaves inside!

Button Corn

We used some old buttons to create fall indian corn!

First, I drew the corn shapes on a piece of cardstock.

Then, we put glue on the corn part and the boys stuck on yellow, orange, & brown buttons.

Finally, we put glue on the leaves and the boys stuck on green buttons!

Fall Circle Tree

Remember that post about the wallpaper books?

Well, this is our first craft using the wallpaper!

I saw this polka-dotted paper with fall colors in the book and thought it would be cute to cut out the circles and have the boys glue them on a tree for a fun fall craft.

If you don't have polka-dot paper, you could also just cut out circles using construction paper or scrapbook paper.

Craft Stick Scarecrows

I saw an idea similar to this over on apples4theteacher.com

Ours were made with:

• craft sticks
• felt
• googly eyes
• tacky glue
• cardstock
• marker

(Need supplies? Check out our recommended craft supplies post!)

Here's how we made them:

1. Before we began the craft, I had cut out the hat, hair (about 7 small rectangles), and nose from felt using different colors.
2. We started by cutting out a square from cardstock and gluing the sticks onto it to keep them sturdy & together.
3. The boys then took turns choosing which color hair and hat they wanted for their scarecrow. We glued the hair on first, then the hat.
4. Next, we glued on the googly eyes & nose and drew a mouth with a black marker.
5. Later, I glued a ribbon on the back so we could hang them up! (not pictured).

They're hanging up in our kitchen & the boys love them. Best of all: they were SO easy to make!

Leaf Toss & Pick-up

I got several packages of these colorful silk leaves at Target last year. We pulled them out and the boys would throw them all up in the air and watch them come down. Then they picked them up and put them in a little bucket. Sometimes I'd say a color and they'd pick up just that color of leaves. But mostly they just played. :)

Now if I could only make picking up toys so much fun.......

Candy Corn Man

This is such a fun and easy Halloween craft for kids!
I found this idea on this blog: Mrs.Schmelzer's First Grade

I thought it was so cute. We just had to give it a try!

We ripped up black, orange, & white construction paper and glued them on the paper candy corn. 

Then we took strips of black paper and folded them accordion-style.

We glued them on, and glued on hands and feet.

Then we added some googly eyes and a nose & mouth!

We have a BUNCH more easy and FUN 
HALLOWEEN crafts and activities. 
Check them out HERE!

In need of craft supplies--like construction paper and googly eyes for this cute craft? Check out our post on the best kid-craft supplies for great prices on Amazon! We've got some good recommendations. :)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!


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Handprint Autumn Tree

LM made this beautiful autumn tree.

First we traced his hand and arm to be the "trunk" of the tree (his hand is covered with the leaves so you can't really see it....)

Then he ripped up small pieces of autumn-colored paper and glued them on his tree.

Last of the Leaves

Fall has lasted far longer than we are used to. It's been wonderful! But sadly, the cold weather is coming and the last of the leaves are finding their way to the ground. Here are a few more fall crafts as we wave goodbye to an awesome autumn.

Both are colorful trees. The first is made from real leaves, and second from paint.

Leaf Crispies

Last year we made rice crispies and cut them out using some leaf cookie-cutters. Then we decorated them with fall-colored frosting and took them to people we are thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Candy Corn Cookies

My friend gave me a great idea to make candy corn cookies. You make sugar cookie dough, split it up into 3 bowls, put food coloring into each one to get the colors you want (leave the white color plain), roll the dough into thin strips of each color and lay them out next to each other. Then cut into triangles, and bake!