Making art using nature
I absolutely love this new season! Autumn transforms everything into a stunning new world, full of brilliant colors and crisp, fresh air. Every walk feels magical—like I’m Snow White, happily wandering among the trees as golden leaves swirl and dance around me. They are just slow enough to turn catching them into a playful adventure. This is the season of exciting changes and fresh beginnings. Best of all, it’s packed with festive, family-filled holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and then Valentine’s Day to welcome in the joy of spring. Each moment is a celebration waiting to happen!
How can you get inside a child’s mind when you are walking through the park looking at the trees, grass, sky. Just watching them, observing everything makes you wonder what are they thinking? This is the wonderful time to get into your child’s mind in the most natural way.
“What do you see?”
“Do you see clouds, or do you see that unicorn with the princess riding on it?”
“Do you see leaves or do you see animal shapes throughout the fallen leaves?”
What better way to get to know how your child sees the world than using all the things around them to create new characters in their play. I love taking my kids for walks around the Fall and used this time to explore all the different things nature made and man-made around us. Last year we found a big pipe on the pipeline behind my moms house and discovered that it made a cool echo. I loved this game because It was not only entertaining but it was a real life situation that I could use to teach them about echoes. As a mom who wants to use every day experiences to create teaching moments, I loved asking him thought provoking questions about the sounds he was creating.
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My son loves going for walks on his bike and running through the leaves trying to find the different colored leaves. I remember when he was younger and had a niche for collecting cool rocks and sticks. We walked through the most beautiful path with trees growing on both sides of the walk way, and afterwards we would look at all the rocks and leaves that we stepped on, and talked about what made them look so neat. Obviously it would be more at his level. With conversations sounding more like “mommy this ones looks like it has an eye!” and “Loook! I have to keep this hulk leaf” because it was big and green still, and probably torn off of a low branch somewhere adjacent to where he was supposed to be walking. Never mind that now. Over the next few years we converted this idea into collecting rocks and shells on the beach. I used this same idea to teach my son how to see the details in everything. Today I had a jar filled to the brim with agates and shells.
It was just a few days ago that I was putting my youngest to sleep and I realized that she finally made her first full circle around the sun this last month. Wow! And I am going back to when my oldest was little and we started a little tradition when he turned one. And I realized that time goes by so fast and I would never get those days back. The good and the bad. I look back at my son at times and think what he was like as a baby and have my Intersteller moment and wish to go back in time.
PROJECT TIME!
Every fall I do projects with my kids that involve everything Autumn. We go for our weekly weekend walk to the park and collect anything that reminds us of bugs, and flowers and animals. Then we come home dry out our collections and make a messy creation on the table. My older daughter tends to make cute little flowers and butterflies out of the leaves and always add sparkles to them. She had a lot of spark to her personality and so does everything she does. On the other hand my son is more mathematical in his thinking and calculates everything while he works. This is a great moment for all parents to use to understand their children’s thought process. How do they differ from one another and do you sees any patterns that reflect what you have instilled in them while they are free to make what they want at will.
What you will need:
Fall time
Colorful leaves
A basket to collect your findings
Scissors
Glue
Other objects from nature that represent the animals that you want to make
An incredible child’s imagination 😉
Step One
Go for a walk. Yes a simple walk with your children is the main point of this project.
Make sure you bring a basket with you so your child can collect all the nature they see around them.
Make sure that when you are going for a walk you are discussing what your children are seeing around them.
We live in such times that many teachers and psychologists have been noticing that the kids can’t focus very well. As a piano teacher I have also noticed that students have a hard time focusing for 30 minutes)
Step Two
After collecting all the wonderful leaves and other (nature things (change this)) talk about what everything looks like and start organizing this with the kids and see what animals they are able to create.
Talk to your kids where they have seen some of these animals and what parts of their bodies did they make. The ears, tail, little feet, bird talons maybe? May your’s and your child’s imagination take you to another world that only you and your child can create. Maybe imagine some new animals and name them yourselves. What a wonderful way to expand your child’s creativity.
Step Three
Take your imagination and just using what you found on your nature walk, make one animal or a whole scene of animals and forests. When I did this project with my kids I made my own because one way that kids learn is by watching and I wanted to make sure that they saw this as a family activity rather than another piece of homework. As I speak another language (Polish), I wanted to take this project a step further to teach my kids new words. I highly support parents keeping their mother tongue or learning another language with their kids.
This project is so versatile in my opinion. It can be adapted from the youngest child who is just learning the sounds that animals make to a teenager that is learning about the biology of different creatures. Why just keep this in an art form when you can create the whole inner works of the animals’ body system. This project is so greate in my opinion because it can be reused very year as the child grows by scaffolding the information and adding new layers of learning.
Go out with your child and let your inner child create new memories with them !!!!!
Proverbs 31:25: "She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come,"
