If your neighbourhood is like mine at the moment, you will have access to many beautiful coloured leaves! It is such fun to enjoy this time of year as a learning opportunity. The very best part of these art activities is definitely the time that you take to find the leaves. Take your toddler/preschooler into the garden or for a walk in the neighbourhood and let them choose a bag of autumn leaves. Don’t forget to talk, talk, talk with your child about what they are seeing. Introduce them to vocabulary about the leaves – colour, shape, texture. Talk about what they can see, feel and how they feel if they get the chance to crunch through older fallen leaves. Usually when you ask a child what colour a leaf is – they will respond with ‘green’. Autumn is the perfect opportunity to display how leaves can be all sorts of colours.

Once you have selected the leaves, now you can start creating !!

Materials:

Chosen leaves

Autumn paint colours can include; red, yellow, orange, blue, green, purple, bronze, brown

A4 sheet of paper

Paint roller or brush (one for each colour)

Paper plates

Black marker pen

Procedure:

Ask your child to choose which colours they would like to work with. Pour the chosen colours onto seperate paper plates.
Using the paint brush or roller, place paint onto the chosen leaf.
Keep applying different paint colours onto the leaf
Place the leaf with the painted side facing downward onto the paper and make leaf prints. Talk with your child about this process – does the print look like the leaf, or are only parts of it showing?
Continue to make leaf prints over the whole page. We tried to place prints at the top and bottom of the page most for the effect of leaves on the branches and on the ground.
When the painting has dried; draw the trunk and branches of your tree with the black marker

In all child directed learning activities, the student in this example chose to paint another piece of paper with the autumn colours and the roller.

The autumn/fall experience was a fun morning of painting

Materials:

Chosen leaves

Coloured crayons

A4 sheet of paper

Procedure:

Place the leaves or leaf underneath the A4 sheet of paper
Using the crayon, colour over the leaf on the top of the paper – using the side of the crayon so that you are shading the outline of the leaf.
Keep applying different colours to the artwork – making the collage as colourful as you like

As an extension fine motor activity, your child can remove the leaf from beneath the artwork and then use the tip of the crayon to trace over the veins of the leaves

Materials:

Chosen leaves

Contact sheet into a large square or rectangle (depending on the size of the collage you are creating)

Procedure:

This is by far the easiest craft activity for a lazy Autumn/Fall afternoon

Using your pre-prepared shape of contact, carefully pull back half of the contact – leaving half with the backing sheet still adhered
Choose the most colourful Autumn leaves and start to place them onto the sticky side of the contact
When you have assembled the leaves in their correct position, then peel back the other half of the contact sheet and fold it over the leaf side of the contact
Display on a window to produce the best results – bring the outside, inside!