Fall Leaf

Here's a fun Fall leaf project Bekah and I did recently. We took a paper bag and I drew a leaf shape on it. Bekah then used her crayons to color it with some Fall colors. Any colors would really be fine, however, I did notice the brighter the colors came out better.

After she was happy with her coloring, we used watered down brown paint to paint over the leaf.

Bekah was very good at painting the whole leaf brown!

Then let it dry. It took quite awhile.

After it's dry, cut out the leaf and crumble it.


Open it up and you have a beautiful Fall leaf that looks authentic. It looks like it has all the veins and colors of a real leaf.

stART - The Busy Little Squirrel

This week our stART project was using the book The Busy Little Squirrel by Nancy Tafuri. I used to think that squirrels were really cute....until they got into a part of my husbands car, chewed some wires and cost us a few hundred dollars! My daughter, however, still likes them, so we chose this book. It's a really cute book about a squirrel who is so busy collecting food for the upcoming winter.

I found the idea for this craft at Preschool Playbook. Bekah has always loved the song Gray Squirrel, so we sang that as we did our project.

Print a coloring page of a squirrel off the computer. I found mine my googling squirrel coloring pages.
Then, have your child drizzle glue all over the squirrel's tail. (don't mind the bedhead...she had just woken up!)


Put cotton balls all over the tail....Bekah wanted a nice bushy tail!


Using a spray bottle with blue and red food coloring (I just mixed until I had a somewhat gray color), have child spray the cotton ball tail. Bekah really loved doing this part.


Let Dry and sing Gray Squirrel, Gray Squirrel, Swish your busy tail. We also read our book again. What a fun project!

You can see what others have done at A Mommy's Adventures.

Open Ended Art - Pumpkins

This is our first week participating in Open Ended Art. I've been wanting to do this for a long time and just never got around to doing it. This weeks theme was pumpkins, and we had a few extra small pumpkins sitting around, so I thought it would be a great time to start.

Bekah decided she wanted to paint her pumpkin, so I let her pick out whatever color she would like. She picked white. Kinda surprised me, but I think she was remembering the white pumpkins we had seen at the pumpkin patch.

Then she decided she wanted to paint more pumpkins, so she did a green one and a blue one. Bekah really loved doing this and we look forward to participating again.

You can see what others have done for Open Ended Art over at Mommies Wise Little Bookworms.

Some more Fall and Halloween Activities

One of my new favoirte sites is called Childcareland. While some things on this site are to buy there are a ton of free printables and video tutorials. This is where I found the recipe for this apple dough. Bekah really enjoys using playdoh and we hadn't done it in a long time, so this afternoon we made some. It smelled so good!
Bekah mixed the ingredients together.


And then we got to play. What fun! This would be a great activity to make ornaments out of at Christmas time.


Another activity we found there were these cute little ghosts. She includes a song to go along and everything. Bekah was having a moment and threw these on the floor, but I thought it was a fun activity! Oh, well.


We also made these Pumpkin seed counting books. I'm still waiting for these to dry and then we will put the pages together.


Hope you enjoy these as much as we did!

Fall/Halloween Muffin Tin

Today's theme for Muffin Tin Monday is Fall Harvest/Halloween. Bekah really enjoyed this muffin tin! Here's what she had:
Peanut Butter cracker made into a pumpkin face, roasted pumpkin seeds, ghost cheese, ghost hardboiled egg, peach yogurt with Halloween sprinkles, and an orange juice box.

I used food markers to make the face on the egg and to make the cracker orange for a pumpkin.
To see what others have made for Muffin Tin Monday head on over to Her Cup Overfloweth.

Autumn Tic Tac Toe Game

Here's another fun Fall/Halloween project to do. I found this idea at Tired, Need Sleep. If you haven't been to her site, you should check it out. She has tons of great ideas!

Go here to get directions to make this. We covered ours with contact paper to last longer. Bekah is just learning how to play tic tac toe, so this has been a really fun game for us to play together. It would be great to take it along to a restaurant to keep your child busy while waiting.