For the young and the young at heart, fall is the time for jumping into piles of leaves, carving pumpkins, and meandering through corn mazes. Now you can bring the colors of fall inside your classroom with these fun activities celebrating the season. Perfect for a preschool classroom, the crafts listed below teach crucial motor skills and are designed with simplicity in mind. Yet they also make great decorations to display in a classroom or to take home to mom and dad!
Fall Leaf Prints
What You Need:
Blank White Paper
Plates
Leaves
Glitter Glue (optional)
1.Pour out a little bit of each paint color onto your plates. Combining several paint colors on each plate will create a dazzling mosaic for your prints. Make your prints sparkle by adding glitter glue at this step.
2.Dip your leaves into the desired paint/glitter colors.
3.Press your leaves onto the white paper. Use your fingers to press firmly along the lines of the leaf to make the leaf structure stand out more. If you want to create a huge collage for your class, you might consider doing everyone's prints on the same long roll of paper. On a smaller scale, you can also do individualized collages on regular 8 1/2" x 11" paper.
A variation of this craft is leaf rubbing, in which a leaf is placed under a piece of paper, which is then colored over with crayons or colored pencils to reveal the leaf's structure.
Fall Coffee Filter Trees
What You Need:
Coffee Filters
Cardboard Tubes (toilet paper or paper towel rolls, etc.)
Washable Markers (assorted colors)
Spray Bottle
Water
1.Color your coffee filters with fall colors--typically red, yellow, and orange. Scribbles will do. This doesn't have to be neat since the colors will run together anyway.
2.Lay your colored filters on a flat surface or, preferably, a drying rack (like one you might use for cookies), and mist them with the spray bottle. Don't soak them. They should be lightly damp in order for the colors to spread over the filter but not run off of the filter.
3.Cut slits in the top of your cardboard tubes, and gently bend the slits to make tree branches.
4.Once the filters are dry, simply stuff them into the top of the tube. Now your beautiful fall tree is done!
Pro-Crafter Tip: Ask all your classroom teachers to save the
toilet paper & paper towel rolls at the end of each week and store them for
future craft projects!
3D Card Stock Pumpkins
What You Need:
Scissors (child-safe with rounded edges for young children)
Ruler
Dark Orange Fine Tip Marker
Black Medium Tip Marker
Two Split Pins
1.Divide
your orange card evenly into 8 sections using the orange marker,
marking the sections off with neat hash marks. A ruler will be handy for
this step to keep the lines straight and the spaces even. The orange
marker will blend into the paper so that it won't show very much once
the pumpkin is formed.
2.Cut out 8 strips of orange card along your hash marks.
3.Punch a hole in one end of each strip large enough for the split pin to go through. (This step may be done by the teacher/parent for young children.)
4.Thread your pieces of card onto the split pin and lock the pin in place.
5.Repeat
steps 3 and 4 with a second split pin on the opposite end of your
strips to create the 3D pumpkin. You will want to cut a small strip of
green card and attach it to the second split pin to form the stalk. Make
sure you thread the green strip onto the pin first so that it will be
on the outside of your pumpkin.
6.Decorate
the outside of your pumpkin with a black marker to create the face.
Voila! Your pumpkin friend is done! Just don't use him to trick or
treat, or your candy might disappear!
