Jasper's nature picture, with maple leaf, maple seeds (samaras), pine needles, pine twig, pinecone, bark, and a tiny flowerOver the weekend we had a ton of work to get taken care of so we were outside most of the day (except when our neighbors were celebrating something with an outdoor karaoke party). Josie remembered doing this last fall before Adelaide was born and suggested it again. With all the neat stuff we have sprouting right now there was a bounty of nature for our nature pictures.My apologies for not having more pictures of the process, but we were all working on it together (having put aside our yard work!).
Materials:
- Heavy paper: cardboard, matboard, cardstock, etc.
- White glue or hot glue for heavier things like shells or large pinecones
- Nature goodies collected from your yard, a nature walk, the park, the neighbor's yard... If you're planning to keep this you may want to select things that dry well (avoid certain flowers or very pulpy leaves).
- May need a craft knife to trim nature objects
- Have your child lay out their objects on the paper in whatever arrangement they'd like. For very three-dimensional objects such as pinecones you may have to shear off one side of the object to give a glue-able area (don't forget to look for seeds inside the pinecone!).
- Lift each object and lay down a good amount of glue.
- Have your child place the object back on the glue (or do it yourself if you're using hot glue).
- Make sure to leave it flat until the glue dries, then handle fairly gently.
Josie's work. She decided to line the objects up along the bottom (maple seeds, pine needles, pinecone, flower, with a long pine twig), then draw them above.
Here's an awful picture of Josie's from last fall--she was just so excited to be able to label everything. I just couldn't get a better shot since it's been installed in Daddio's office in a shadowbox (for-evah!).
When you're done go get a straw and pretend to drink nectar from all the flowers with your proboscis!
Comments for this post
