Fall, which it is now here in New York is a great time to make projects with leaves. Of course, fall projects will consist of gorgeous red, yellow and multicolored leaves. The project we did here was in the Summertime when we just had boring green leaves. However, it was tied in to our book we were doing in our literacy project called Leaf Man. I have another post on this blog with some nature crafts that have some leaf projects in it as well that you can check out as well.

A year ago when hurricane Sandy came roaring through our neighborhood we thankfully did not suffer any major damage.(cannot say the same for many of the people in our neighborhood)

We did however, have a huge tree in our backyard fall. Being cheap, we didn’t have the tree guys take the stump out just had them cut it all the way down. What was left was kind of a little hill in the back of our yard, since the tree had uprooted the ground.

A couple of months later stalks started growing on that little  hill and sprouting really large leaves you can see below.

We decided to use those leaves (along with others) to do our leaf man projects.

At first we just had them make “leaf people” to stick with the  Leaf Man theme. We did give other things like googly eyes and ribbon and feathers to use if they wanted to.

Then I thought, hmmm. these leaves are so large I’ll bet we can use them as a palette themselves. So I brought out these really gorgeous makers I had used in teaching kids drawing a while back.

Guess what? The markers did not take to the leaves, so there went the markers.

 I  decided then to use my acrylic paints that I had (at this point I was up to using my grandson to experiment  on the big leaves)

I put dabs of different colors on a styrofoam tray

and told him to paint them how he liked.

Which  he did.

We then had to decide what to do with these painted leaves. So after they dried, I asked him to figure out what he wanted to do with them and this is what he did.

I’m sure there are many things I could have come up with as well but, he created his own flower with the leaves which is quite beautiful.

 The funny thing  now is that as fall sets in, those leaves are turning colors though not as vibrant as the acrylics. I must say,  It’s really funny because this is all from the ground and not from the tree itself  I guess there still must be life there.(there has to be an analogy in there somewhere)