Tutorial Tuesday: Fall Centerpieces using Bag Painting

This week's guest blogger is Tina from Mamas Like Me.  Her blog is packed full of all kinds of activities that she does with her children including crafts, letter and writing activities, math, science, recipes, and much more. Please stop by and get some wonderful ideas!

I saw the idea for finger-painting in a bag over at Open Hands and figured I'd give it a try with this activity. The bags made it easier (and less messy) for us to paint both sides of these Fall leaves - and I love how the colors blended. 

 For this activity, we used:

 Red, Orange, and Yellow paint 

Leaf shapes cut out of card stock 

(I highly recommend the card stock rather than regular construction paper) 

Ziplock bags 

Glitter Glue 

Ribbon 

A branch from outside 

1. To prep for this, I cut leaf shapes out of card stock for each child.

2. Then, I put one leaf into each bag, along with a squirt of red, orange, and yellow paint, and a few drops of water to help it mix. Make sure there is some paint on both sides of the leaf. Try to get as much air out of the bag as possible when sealing it.

3. Next the kids had fun squishing the paint around and covered their leaves.

4. (Now, for the messy part!) I took the leaves out of each bag and replaced them with another leaf so each child got to do more than one.

5. When the kids were done covering their leaves, I offered them the option of just finger-painting with the paint in the bag. Some of them wanted to continue squishing with the paint and some were finished :)

6. Once the leaves dried, we used glitter pens to write each child's first initial on their leaves. (I love getting letters into an activity).

7. After the glitter dried, we hole-punched each leaf and tied it with ribbon.

8. Then, we went outside and found a branch to hang our leaves on and make our own Fall tree inside.

Doesn't it make an adorable centerpiece? You could also use these for garland or hang them in a window.

Tina is a former Elementary School teacher turned SAHM to three active boys (with one more on the way)! She blogs at Mamas Like Me where she shares kids activities, recipes, tips on frugal living, and reflections on life as ‘Mommy’.

Fall Wrap-Up

As we are winding down our fall study, we compared our weather chart that we have been working on to see if the temperatures have been getting colder or warmer. We also did another pumpkin and leaf activity. This is just a center that we put out for children to make pumpkins with gear blocks (IDK what they are really called, so I call them gear blocks). Anyway, I began to think about how I set up centers. One was is just to put out the blocks on the table in the container like this:

While we may be tempted to do this as we might say it evokes more creativity, it is not very inviting and there is no prompt to show children what you want them to do.  So here is how I prepared the center:

With this purposeful planning, you are more likely to get results such as this:

The next activity I did with the kids was one I found on a blog or Pinterest, I can't remember exactly where, but if you happen to know where it came from, please leave me a comment :)

Leaf prints with different colored paint:

And here are the wonderful results!

Thinky Linky Thursday: Look What I Did with a Leaf!

This is the homework that we sent home this week. We read the book Look What I Did with a Leaf as shown in this blog post. The students were supposed to make a figure out of leaves such as a person, animal, etc. Here is what they came up with:

LOVE THIS ONE!

Also, we have been keeping track of the weather and charting it this week. We will continue this next week by drawing a thermometer and seeing where each of the temperatures are on it as the children did not seem to understand the concept of such big numbers and which was higher or lower than the other.

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Painted Pumpkin Centerpiece

Here is just a little craft I made as a centerpiece. Just painted and glittered the white and black pumpkin and tied on the ribbon. They can be used with a candle as shown below or some other arrangement of fall items including pinecones, mini hay bales, etc.  Or you could sit them on a decorative tray.

Here are some close-ups.

Just to add some more fall, here is a photo of my back yard. Happiness :)

Thinky Linky Thursday:Apple Word Family Sort

Apple Word Family Sort

Simple to make, just cut out the basket.

Cut out apples with the words.

And label the baskets with the word family.

Have fun and link up!!!

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Storytime Sunday:Fall Leaves

Lots of changes are coming to Preschool Teacher blog! First of all, I've purchased a domain name: cacheymama.com! I am so excited! Right now I am just redirecting to the blog, but eventually I may make a website as a HQ for everything Cacheymama like the blog, my etsy shop, geocaching, etc. Also, my Etsy Banner is done thanks to Kampie Mana. It is displayed at the top of this blog, so please click and check it out!!! Also, Kampie Mana is working on the new design for Preschool Teacher blog. She is a wonderful artist, so please get in touch with her for custom graphics and designs!

Ok, on to storytime! Well, it may not be fall yet, but it won't be long until those leaves start to change and fall. So, here are some books about leaves!

This book is great! It shows leaf animals you can make for an art project. It goes into detail about many artistic concepts in a child-friendly way such as size, shape, contrasting colors, edges, and layering. It is more than a craft because it teaches the kids how to think about the art they make and what types of media they want to use and make their own choices about how they want it to look. It also talks about other projects you can do with leaves and the life cycle of a leaf. 

It tells about different seasons.

There is a field guide in the back to help the children identify leaves they find. Great science activity!

Here are a couple other fall leaf books I love:

HAPPY READING!