Posts Tagged ‘fall decorations’

Celebrate all that your child is Thankful for with this cute and easy handprint craft.

You will need:

• White Paper (thicker paper or cardstock is better)
• Brown Paint
• Red, Yellow, Orange Construction Paper
• Scissors
• Glue Stick

Start by painting the inside of the child’s arm and palm with brown paint.  Press onto the white paper to form the tree trunk and branches.  Let dry.

Cut leaf shapes out of the consturction paper.  If child is old enough have them write things they are thankful for on the leaves.  I also did this project with my 1 and 3 year olds.  The 3 year old dictated to me and I wrote for him and the 1 year old’s tree has blank leaves.

Have child glue their leaves onto the tree branches.

Frame and display for the Thankful Season!

One of our good friends and neighbors was putting up a scarecrow as one of her Halloween decorations. We always did this as kids too, but I hadn’t gotten around to putting one up for Peyton, yet. Well when she hear that Jayden was going to have a scarecrow, of course she wanted to make one too!

So this is what we did…and it was fun and inexpensive!

We didn’t have any old ‘scarecrow’ clothes to stuff so I went to the thrift store on post and found a pair of Oshkosh overall’s for $3 and an orange plaid shirt for $1.75. We also had to come up with a head so I thought instead of buying something, let’s make one!

We did paper mache over a balloon to make the shape. This is so fun and easy and all you need is a few household items:

Balloon
Strips of newspaper
flour
water

To make the paste for paper mache you should use 1 part flour to 2 parts water. You want your mixture to be the consistency of glue but not so thick that it is like paste. Once we had our bowl of ‘glue’ I let Peyton go to town! She had so much fun dipping the strips in the glue and picking the perfect places to lay it out on the balloon!

Once the paper mache was dry we decided it would be very ‘Halloween’ to paint it like a Jack-o-lantern. If your children are older, you may choose to use a Halloween mask to cover the head but with the little one’s I’m not a fan of making it scary. I bought orange and black washable paint at the craft store for about $2 each.

Next was one of Peyton’s favorite parts; gathering leaves to stuff the scarecrow. We went into the ‘forest’ (I use quotations here because that’s what Peyton calls the wooded area by our house) and filled up plastic grocery bags with leaves to use as the scarecrow’s stuffing.

Once we had our scarecrow stuffed we sat him on the front porch and topped off his outfit with a dollar store cowboy hat!

Preston with his Scarecrow Buddy