Day 18: a tree in all seasons

Maybe a bit of a stretch for my first color activity of the week but we needed an inside activity and painting sounded like a great idea.

SO, this activity seemed like a good idea.

I took black construction paper (couldn't believe I didn't have a SINGLE piece of brown!) and cut it out in the shape of a tree with no leaves. Then I glued it to a piece of blue construction paper.  
I told Sam she was going to paint the leaves and flowers on the trees but we were going to paint one picture for every season of the year.  We started with spring (the picture above is painting winter, but you get the idea) and she painted yellow and pink on the trees to be the flowers that were blooming in the spring (did you know that EVERY tree has some kind of flower? most are just very small so that we don't normally notice).  I put each color in its own bowl and gave her cotton balls to use for the painting. 
After she painted spring I asked her what color the leaves were right now on the trees.  She told me they were green so I gave her two different shades of green to paint on a different tree to be the summer tree.  Then we did red, yellow and orange for Fall and white for winter to be the snow on the trees.

Once she had done all four seasons she asked to do some more so I grabbed the black paper that I had cut the trees out of, took the "scrap" and glued that to another piece of blue.  The space from where the tree had been cut out made another great tree for her to paint.  She did the four seasons again. 

Each time she painted I made sure she could identify the colors we were painting with and talked about why we were using those colors.  I know she is too young to truly understand seasons, but I still think it is good to explain things. 
She was very proud of all of her trees.  And it did help to practice her colors. 

My husband asked me today if she has figured out green yet (she frequently gets it confused with other colors!).  Can you believe that the color my daughter struggles the most with is GREEN? HA!

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The Nitty Gritty!

I got this activity from "Arty Facts; Plants and Art Activities" by Crabtree Publishing.  However their version is NOTHING like what I did!  Because of Sam's age I had to really simplify the idea.  The authors described making the tree trunk out of cut strips of textured paper glued onto a drawn tree outline (okay, this I simplified because I didn't think that I could do that!), and then using different color tissue paper torn into pieces to be the leaves on the trees.  I think the textures and 3D effect of their idea would be neat but I didn't think Sam would be able to really tear the tissue paper, apply the glue and then stick the tissue paper without making a tissue paper and glue mess.  So I opted for paint instead. 

The cotton balls for painting made a neat effect and were a different tool for Sam to use, however they became pretty flimsy quite quickly and we went through a LOT of cotton balls.  We switched to a sponge type paint brush at the end and this worked well too.  A regular kitchen sponge cut into small pieces would work too and could be rinsed and reused. 

Comments

[Kim V.]

This is such a great idea to teach young ones about the changing seasons! How old is Sam? She is quite handy with messy paints. I love how the finished trees came out; all the beautiful colors! I think it would look really nice, framed all in separate frames but grouped together on the wall.

One of my favorite books that "teaches" about the changing seasons is "Ox Cart Man" by Donald Hall. It's an old, out of print book, but most libraries have it. It's a good one.

[Kristen]

that is such a good idea! She did a fantastic job! You should laminate them :)

[mom kuhn]

love the idea of framing them, they look great! And of course Sam is beautiful.

[gina]

I think I'll do this with L this week. I do have brown paper...but I don't have cotton balls! I know I could use a paintbrush or his fingers, but I like the cotton ball idea. :)

[Angela]

I love the trees. They remind me of artwork I see in children's books.

[MaeKellan]

I love the trees, they look great! My daughter used to get confused between yellow and green.