This idea comes from September’s issue of Family Fun magazine and I think it’s a perfect way to celebrate Autumn with your toddler or preschooler. The craft is called a “printed-palm tree” (palm as in hand, not a tropical palm tree). First have your child paint his or her palm and wrist with brown tempera, then press them on a piece of paper to make a print. For easier cleanup, add one tablespoon of dish soap for each 1/3 cup of paint. While the tree is drying, your child can add red fingerprint apples. Have him or her squeeze white glue over the branches and under the tree, then sprinkle on torn-up, colorful leaves and blades of grass gathered from a nature walk. Allow the collage to dry completely before hanging.

I also did a few other related crafts with my children recently that would be great Autumn crafts…

In teaching my daughter the letter L, she colored in a large letter L I drew on a piece of construction paper, and then she glued on dried leaves that we had found (to remind her that the L makes the sound as in leaf). I then cut the L out and we glued it onto another piece of construction paper.

Also, my son had gathered a whole bag full of acacia tree seed pods that I wasn’t quite sure what to do with. So, I had him color a picture of a tree and we glued the seed pods onto the tree. It turned out to be a fun craft!

Because we learned about animal camouflage in our current web of life session, I decided to expand on this subject at home with some more stories and a craft. To show the effects of camouflage, I had my children pick out an animal (I used old nature calendars, but you could also find some in old magazines), and then cut them out. (Older children can cut them out on their own, younger ones will need some help with this step). Then we found some construction paper the same color as the animals (both of my children happened to pick brown animals), and glued them onto the paper. We discussed what habitat they might live in and they colored in the rest of the scene – trees, a rock, grass, etc. Some of the additional books we read include: What Color is Camouflage? By Carolyn Otto, What Do You Do When Something Wants to Eat You? By Steve Jenkins, and Hiding Out – Camouflage in the Wild by James Martin. The text in the last book might be a bit advanced for younger children but the pictures illustrate various types of camouflage really well. All three of these books are available through the Sonoma County library system.

Collages of all kinds make great crafts – they are a lot of fun for children to make and they offer a lot of different learning opportunities. For example, you could make a nature color collage where you try to find as many different colors as possible in nature and glue your findings onto poster board or a piece of cardboard. Punch holes in the top and tie some string through, and voila!, you’ve got some great artwork to hang on the wall! Other ideas for nature collages could include finding different kinds of seeds, making a collage of different colored and different types of leaves (great autumn project), or a feather collage. For the very young ones, making a collage of anything they find in nature and inevitably bring home (pretty leaves, sticks, small rocks, acorns, etc.) makes a great collage too – it doesn’t always have to follow a theme.

Below is a picture of some collages we made recently with my two children as well as my sister’s three children, all in the two to five year old age range. We decided to make a “touch collage” where the children’s task was to find different textures in nature. They found smooth pebbles, grainy sand, rough sticks and bark, bumpy leaves, spiky pine needles and rough peach pits. We glued all these findings onto cardboard rectangles.