Make Leaf Silhouette Artwork

Create a sort of reverse print by capturing the negative space, or the area around the leaf.

Even if you don’t live in area where you get to collect autumn-bright leaves, there are still plenty of art projects that feature leaves. Here’s one to get you started. You want to go out and gather leaves with a variety of shapes.

There are several ways to show off the silhouette, or outline, of a leaf. Set a leaf on a piece of paper and hold it in place with one hand. Then try one of these following techniques,

• Dip a paintbrush in watercolors, poster paints, or tempera paints. Starting on the leaf, paint over the edge of the leaf onto the paper, extending the brush strokes as far as desired.
• Dip a cut sponge in paint and dab the sponge along the outline of the leaf.
• Dip an old toothbrush in paint. Then run the handle of a paintbrush along the bristles of the toothbrush. The paint will spatter and fall around the outline of the brush. (You won’t hold the leaf in place with your hand for this variation.)
• Cover the leaf with a piece of cheesecloth or burlap that is larger than the leaf. With a sponge dipped in paint, dab the sponge over the fabric. Avoid using too much paint or rubbing the sponge over the fabric. With this technique, the textured pattern from the fabric will get added to the silhouette surrounding the leaf shape.
• Do several leaf silhouettes over a sheet of paper. Allow some of the paint surrounding the shapes to overlap, creating different colors.
• After the paint dries, go back and paint the white space with a brush in a complementary color.

After painting around the edge of the leaf, carefully remove the leaf. The shape of the leaf will be white, with paint surrounding where the leaf was held. Decorate around the silhouette as desired, including adding more silhouette images to the page.

Clean Quest - Get Rid of Litter

Part game, part good deed, this activity reminds children to think twice before tossing trash.

Materials: a pair of non-latex gloves and a trash bag for each participant, one pair of tongs or trash grippers, optional prizes

Do you and your children walk along a road or trail where people carelessly toss their trash? Does this diminish your experience of this location? Talk to your children about going to this location to pick up trash. Outfit each person with non-latex gloves and trash bags. The person to fill a bag with the most trash receives a small reward costing under a dollar (a tumbled gemstone, a small plastic animal, or a pencil).

Remind children to avoid picking up sharp objects or broken glass. You may want to have a pair of tongs to safely pick up these items. To keep energy levels high, set a time limit (if the kids want to keep going, that’s fine; however, if you end the activity while they are still enthusiastic then they will likelier be willing to do this again).

You may want to take a picture of everyone with their bags of trash and ask the site you helped clean to post the picture. Your actions may even remind people to not litter.

This teaches children about stewardship, caring for the environment. It is also a reminder that sometimes an individual must act instead of waiting for others to meet a task.

15 Minutes Outside

Whether you are at home or on vacation today, go for a walk with your child. It doesn’t have to be a lengthy walk – 15 minutes will do; and you don’t have to go anywhere ‘special’ for this walk. One of the goals of the walk is to remind yourself and your children that nature isn’t ‘out there’ – some place that takes effort to get to, a place that by some definition is ‘nature.’

Today, walk around the neighborhood and name ten wild things that you and your children can see, hear, feel, or smell. Yep, even if you are taking a 15 minute walk, notice ten things in nature – a crow flies overhead, the rough bark of the tree along the side of the road, crickets chirping, the smell of fresh cut grass, etc.

The time limit, layered onto the simple observation activity, forces you and your children to pay attention to your surroundings. Even if you were going for an hour-long walk, you wouldn’t be able to keep up the intensity of observation. Instead, you’d drift into conversations about schedules and other activities that you’ve done or will do.

After fifteen minutes, you’ll return home full of your experience in nature. Although there may be more trees in the forest, your children will have felt the bark, noticed the shape of the leaves, and seen the birds perching on the branches of the trees you walked past. Nature is everywhere.

Explore the Backyard

You and your kids will need a backyard for this activity. Even if you live in an apartment, chances are there is some small patch of trees and/or shrubs and maybe even a bit of grass. Don’t discount that patch of greenery.

Oftentimes, we overlook the things closest to us, and that includes nature. Granted a patch of grass shaded by a tree isn’t the same as local conservation land with paths leading you through acres of forests, fields, or wetlands, but you can still explore.

• Give kids a magnifying glass for getting an up close view of insects, seeds, soil, leaves, flower parts, etc.
• A collection jar with holes doesn’t cost a lot of money (check dollar stores) and gives kids the chance to hold onto insects, worms, and small frogs for a short period, giving them the opportunity to examine the creature. Keep the creatures out of direct sun and release them after ten-or-fifteen minutes.
• A white pillow case or piece of fabric will allow kids to set their discoveries – including crawling insects – on the ground while providing maximum contrast.
• Paper and crayons, markers, or watercolors encourages children to take a closer look at their discoveries as they create a journal entry or create a picture.
• A digital camera also encourages exploration, particularly if you challenge a child to take a certain number of photographs of their surroundings.
• With kids ages 8-or-9 and up, you might want to supply some “First” field guides that can help the children to identify the trees, flowers, or insects around them. Trying to identify aspects of nature is something like solving a mystery – can the children notice enough clues that will lead them to the correct conclusion.

Don’t worry if kids don’t stay “on task” by accomplishing some specific exploration. Get them outside with a hook, “Can we find any caterpillars in the garden?” and then watch them discover the things that most interest them.

Photography for Kids – Angles

Changing the angle at which you take a photograph is one of the most fun and easy ways to create interesting photographs. Instead of taking a picture head-on from the obvious “front” you produce imagines that get viewers to pause and maybe even think about what you are showing them.

By walking around a subject kids may discover a “secret” about that object that others overlook. By changing the tilt of the camera, kids can manipulate an image so to make it look larger or smaller

If you hold the camera high and angle it down, you can make something look smaller or foreshortened. Angling the camera is an easy bit of ‘trick’ photography; although you’re not creating an optical illusion, you are making people see the subject of your photo in a different way than they may normally have view that subject.

Walk around one interesting subject and take a
__Front angle
__Back angle
__Left angle
__Right angle

Select one subject and take a
__High angle
__Normal angle
__Low angle
__Take a picture while holding the camera at a small tilt
__Take a picture while holding the camera at a medium tilt
__Take a picture while holding the camera at a large tilt

Check out more fun art projects in by eBook, Art in Nature, Nature in Art.

Make a Flower Chain

A child wearing a headband or necklace of interlocked daisies just seems to symbolize carefree summer. Although it takes a bit to get used to interlocking the flowers, children with good fine motor skills (they can tie their own shoes with ease) can learn the process. Younger children can pick the flowers. Just be warned – you probably won’t be able to work fast enough if you have more than one child waiting!

You want a flower with a stem that you can easily slit with your thumbnail. The stem should also be flexible enough to bend without it crooking into a sharp angle. The shorter the stem, the more flowers you’ll need, setting the blossoms close together.

With your thumbnail, cut a slit through the stem. Next, slide the stem of another flower through the slit. The blossom of the second flower should stop at the slit of the first flower. Continue until the piece is as long as desired. To finish off the chain and bring it into a loop, make a larger slit in the last stem and fit it over the first flower. That’s it!

Nature Investigation and Imagination

When walking with your child or children you can keep a few games in mind to play along the way. The games help to focus both you and your children on your surroundings. It is easy to get caught up in conversations, which, although valuable to your relationship, can move you out of the present moment. Instead of noticing where you are walking at the moment you are busy talking about going to the mall and selecting a birthday present for the child’s friend.

You can still talk, but every so often try to bring everyone’s awareness to the moment with sensory activities. The following game starts off with observation and works its ways to a (sometimes wild) imagination activity. Whether your child is a preschooler or a preteen, this word game allows kids to stretch their creativity.

One person starts this game by looking around and selecting something fairly large that is within view, such as a mountain or a tree, and says, “I see a tree.” The next person then picks something big on the tree, and says, “I see bark on the tree.” The next person has to pick a thing that’s on the bark, “I see a branch on the bark.” (If two people are playing, then you would go back-and-forth with your child.)

Participants continue in this fashion, noticing smaller and more specific details until they can no longer actually see anything to mention. Then they are free to make up details, such as, “I see a bug on the leaf,” and the next person might say, “I see a baby bug on the back of the big bug,” and so on until players can’t think of anything smaller. Move down the trail and have a different individual start another round.

Take Your Teddy Bear for a Walk

Chances are that your kids have indoor toys and outdoor toys. However, they can liven up their outdoor play by taking some of those indoor toys outside. This may actually encourage children to play outside, particularly if they thought that the only way they could play with certain items was to do so inside.

If your child likes playing dress up, then dressing up like a fairy or a knight takes on a whole new level when the child can bestow fairy magic to the flowers in the garden or the child can sneak among the trees and shrubs in search of dragons and evildoers.

Barbie may enjoy a boating expedition down a slow-moving stream. Invite stuffed animals to a picnic under the backyard tree instead of keeping them cooped up inside waiting for high tea. Action figures may encounter more action among grass and fallen branches than they’d ever come across in the land of carpeting and dining room chair legs.

Okay, building toys like K’nex or Lego probably won’t manage grass and dirt without a number of pieces going missing. However, if your child hasn’t played with a toy for months, see if taking it outside gives the item a second life.

Work jigsaw puzzles on a piece of plywood. Draw, color, paint, or work on activity books outside at a picnic table.

Taking indoor toys outside just might spark your children’s imaginations and creativity.

Puddle Science for Kids

If there’s a puddle, most kids will gravitate toward it. A few kids will hold back but oftentimes that is because of fear of mom or dad’s wrath with wet or muddy clothes. Pull out some old, stained, or never-quite-right clothing from your child’s wardrobe and designate them outdoor play clothes if, as mom or dad (or the adult who hands kids off to mom and dad) you are concerned with seeing grass stains and mud across the knees of a pair of jeans.

Spring and summer are great times of year to explore puddles because the weather is warmer and there is less chance of getting chilled. Rain boots are perfect for splashing around; although, an old pair of sneakers is fine as well. Raincoats can be hot and some kids are happier without a coat – if they can go inside and change into dry clothing after time outside, then kids don’t have to deal with the restriction of not getting wet.

Some kids will go outside and feel right at home exploring and playing in puddles. If your child is weather-wary, join them outdoors and guide them through a few simple activities.

Water Activities
If it is raining, watch the way the drops interact with the surface. Children will learn to look outside on a rainy day and predict how hard it is rainy by watching droplets hit the puddles.

Try floating leaves on puddles. Children will see how the depth of water affects the way the leaf boats can move.

Gather a collection of dry twigs (or use craft sticks) and measure the depth of a few puddles. Can the children hypothesize why some puddles are deeper than others?

Splash! Toss different objects into puddles of different depths. What reaction can kids get from a leaf, an acorn, a pebble, or even themselves! Watch for splash patterns. Kids may even want to measure the depth of water in a puddle after they’ve jumped into it.

Encourage children to come up with their own experiments and games – perhaps they will trace the edge of a puddle and measure by the day or hour how quickly it takes to evaporate. If kids haven’t spent a lot of time outdoors in the rain, they may range from timid to wild; try the experience a few times so they can get used to exploring the rainy world.

Weather or Not to Send Kids Outside

Originally published 4/06/2011 at explorelongtheway.com

Many adults remember playing outdoors as kids no matter what the weather was; in fact, the way they tell it, their parents insisted on it. Drizzle or downpour, sun or snow, kids played outdoors. The ironic thing is that the topic of playing outside as kids comes up when people start commenting on how today’s kids stay indoors because their parents insist on it.

Now, theoretically, some of those outdoor-playing children of the past are the present-day parents with the deer-in-the-headlights look when they hear that their child will be walking through more than an inch of snow or going outside during a light rain.

So, what happened to the outdoor-playing children of the past to turn them into weather-wary parents of the present? In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv cites evidence to the benefits of being outdoors along with data supporting the increasing unlikelihood of finding children enjoying the outdoors. Yet, if children have a place to go outside – whether it is the schoolyard or the backyard – why do many adults use weather to stop them at the door? Current outdoor clothing seems more apt for the weather than what I wore thirty-plus years ago as a kid. Still, as a child, I was entrenched in a variety of weather-appropriate outerwear.

However, I have seen kids come to outdoor field trips without hats, gloves, and no more than a sweatshirt when there was two feet of snow on the ground. During rainy days at summer camp – a nature camp, mind you, numerous children wouldn’t arrive with a raincoat and they would insist that they didn’t even own such a garment.

I’m thinking that some kids don’t have things to wear outdoors so they don’t go outside and their parents don’t buy them outerwear because their kids don’t go outdoors. Will the child who runs from vehicle to building when it is raining ever become an adult who does more than move from one climate-controlled environment to the next? Will watching the nature channel on a rainy day replace laughing at bedraggled squirrels trying to twitch their tails dry and fluffy or pulling earthworms out of puddles and moving them to the drier soil beneath the shrubs. Can you love nature when you don’t even know it?

Creating Earth Art with Kids

Originally published 3/18/2011 at explorealongtheway.com

Earth art, eco-art, land art … This type of nature art involves using natural materials to produce instillations, art that cannot be removed from its setting. The artist, child or adult, is able to use whatever he or she can find and manipulate without the addition of glue, string, tape, or any other fastener or manmade materials.

Land art is an interesting challenge for children who may be used to more traditional craft projects. Because natural materials lack the uniformity of manufactured supplies kids need to use some creative problem solving in order to balance items, get them

Select a location alongside a path or trail – While you want people to see your creations, you don’t want them stepping on them. You also want to give enough space to the children so they can work without them standing in the middle of a trail where other people are walking.

Encourage children to explore the area and gather a supply of materials before they start creating – Give kids clear boundaries for where they can go to collect supplies (within your sight). Examining the area before they start makes them aware of what is available to use. Also, they’ll find it easier to work on their project if they have stuff to work with, or at least get started.

Will kids be able to use any materials they find or do you want to give them the challenge of just using pinecones, rocks, branches, grass, etc. Although you may think this limits children’s creativity, it encourages them to find unique ways to use what they can. When I did a six-week eco-art series with kids, I encouraged individual days featuring pinecones, branches, grass, and leaves – kids then did two “multi-media” days in which they could use whatever materials they wanted. By selecting different locations for each session kids always had the challenge of working with a variety of materials.

Define individual work areas – Before kids start, they may need to clear leaf litter or create a boundary of branches so other children working at the same time can see other’s work areas. Considering this type of project blends in with the surroundings there is the risk of children stepping on another child’s artwork or taking items from an easily accessible “pile of stuff” without noticing that the items belong to another’s projects.

Will kids work together or individually? – If you want kids to work together, decide whether you will assign pairs or if kids can select their partners. If kids are working by themselves, watch for kids who become frustrated working on their project and then casually start “helping” another child. Oftentimes, the child who was working by himself becomes frustrated by the second child who is now adding their own take to the first child’s project.

Doing earth art with your child or with a camp group or classroom-full of children is a possibility as long as you define clear boundaries – where will kids do the work, will they work together or individually, and what materials will they work with. Part of the fun of land art is that kids make the art, leave it where it is, and then others can discover the creations while on their walk.

Write a Diamante about Nature

Originally published 3/01/2011 at explorealongtheway.com
While making observations in nature you may want a record of what you see. You could take a picture or make some notes, but another way of collecting your interpretation of your time in nature is to write a poem.

If you never willingly wrote a poem because you think a poem has to be obscure, this simple format allows you to capture tangible details. In essence, a diamante is a diamond-shape poem. The lines don’t have to rhyme. As an added bonus for adults and the children, you don’t even have to think in partial or entire lines of poetry. A diamante is constructed of individual words that are placed in a specific pattern.

A poem is a great way to capture observations that you and children have made in nature. A diamante feels a bit more purposeful than taking notes; because, what are you going to do with those notes? When you write a poem, you are done. Accent a diamante with a photograph or a drawing and you can set the two in a scrapbook or combine them on the computer and post them online for friends and family to share.

The basic format of a diamante uses specific types of words. Writers can work on this poem on their own or you can lead this as a group activity, with individuals calling out words that fit the structure. The key to holding this structure together is that the selected words should have something to do with the topic, as described by the first word.

Line 1: Noun (person, place or thing)

Line 2: Adjective Adjective (words that describes a person place or thing; not an action)

Line 3: Participle Participle Participle (a verb, an action, ending in –ing)

Line 4: Noun Noun Noun Noun

Line 5: Participle Participle Participle

Line 6: Adjective Adjective

Line 7: Noun (another way of describing the person, place, or thing from the first line)

You use the words that best capture the sights, senses and experiences of a specific location. That’s it. Sixteen words, no punctuation. You are a poet. Why not start by writing a diamante and posting it below in the comments?

Photography Crafts for Kids

Originally published 2/25/2011 at explorealongtheway.com
In yesterday’s blog, “Nature and Kids – Been There, Seen That?” I suggested that parents and their children or preteens go out to one spot in nature each day and notice how it was different from the previous day. An easy place to visit may be a tree in your backyard, although you could visit a pond or vernal pool, a garden (even if it gets covered in snow), or any place that you will be able to go to the majority of the year’s days.

Older kids and preteens may find this activity more interesting if they take a photograph each day. However, they shouldn’t just snap a picture from the same angle each day. First, they should look at their tree questing for something different. Today they see a caterpillar and take its picture.

These photographs could become part of a nature observation blog. Maybe the blog consists of the photograph and fewer than ten words each day and only grandma who lives across the country reads this blog.

Maybe a month or a season of photographs gets put into a slide show, combined with music, and go onto YouTube. Maybe the images become the screen saver on the family computer – another photograph gets added each day – and you end up watching the year scroll by.

A crafty child may create a scrapbook combining photographs with pressed leaves or smudges of dirt or sand smeared across the paper. Print out the pictures to make a collage for each season. The pictures don’t all have to be the same size. Older children and preteens who know how to insert and manipulate the placement of pictures on the computer could connect the images from a month onto a single-page document. At the end of the year, you have a book.

You don’t have to start this project on January 1st. Start this in the spring so you can watch nature expand toward summer and then quiet itself for the winter. You may have more time in the summer to make this a regular activity. A teacher may begin this in the fall and go throughout the school year – will her students want to go to the schoolyard in the summer so that they can see how nature presents itself during this season?

The key here isn’t what you do with your observations; your goal is to start noticing what is happening outside your front door.