Leaf Prints with Paint

Leaf Prints

I love the colours of Autumn.  Even though the weather has started to get colder the beautiful reds, oranges, golds and yellows of the trees always make me feel happy.  I just love leaves, they can be pressed into clay, salt dough, air dry clay, plaster, play dough, cookies or paint.  Their shapes and veins always leave a lovely impression or shape.

Part of the fun of any leaf exercise is collecting them.  We took a long time to get home from school this lesson day as the children collected and gathered leaves as we walked along.  We even collected more from our garden when we got home and during the lesson.

Leaf prints with paint are really easy to do.  This lesson was inspired by Deep Space Sparkle again.  However a quick google on leaf prints brings up lots of lovely ideas if you want to try something a little different.  I really love the bag and gift cards done by Skip to My Lou.

You will need:

• Leaves (try to pick some off the actual trees so they are not dry and crumbly)
• Poster Paint in White and Autumn Colours
• Scrap pieces of newspaper
• Small sponges (I cut up a cheap square sponge into several bits)
• Black Paper

How to:

Ask the children to paint the back of the leaves with white paint.  Then they place the leaf, paint side down onto their piece of black paper, put a piece of scrap newspaper on top and press down.  Then remove paper and gently pull off the leaf.  This is the most exciting part!  When they have a number of leaf prints on their page they can use the sponges dipped in Autumn coloured paint to fill in the space around the leaves.

The results:

Leaf Prints (Prep & Grade 2)

Cheers
Fiona