Falling leaves

Yesterday was a pinterest day! When Blue was a baby, I didn't know about pinterest and wasn't on it, so all of the crafts and whatnot were things I had either done as a child, saw from blogs, or thought sounded fun. 

Pinterest has opened a whole new world of fun things to do, though :)

Our theme for this month has been fall - harvest, pumpkins, season changes, etc. They're doing "fall" in Blue's nursery school class and well, it's the perfect season for it obviously! So we have gone outside and watched the trees, we made our "forest tree" last month (still need to upload pics), and we wove baskets (also need to upload) to keep our "apples" and "pumpkins" in under the tree. 

A few days ago, I searched "fall craft" on pinterest, and people had a ton of great ideas. I do believe I spammed my pinterest page full of repins :) This is one of the projects I came across and thought "how perfect." So yesterday we attempted to do just a straight art image of it. And in the future we can do the ziplock bag falling leaves part :)

So for the art project, I assembled the craft paper, scissors, and glue. 

When Blue woke up from her nap, she had her snack - an apple - while I started cutting out a tree for each edge of the paper. I just freehanded it. Blue and I talked about fall, how the weather changes, and how the leaves change colors. They must be talking about apples at school, because Blue told me all about how apples fall from trees in the fall too :)

Materials assembled, I glued the trees to our paper (I wanted a black backdrop, but decided purple would work too). And then I talked about how in the fall the leaves start to fall, and I put a bunch of glue spots on the paper on the branches and falling down to the ground. 

Then we added our leaves, another layer of glue on top of the "floor leaves" and then dumped the remainder of the leaves onto the "ground." It turned out quite nicely!

This only took about twenty minutes though, so we then headed out to the grass to actually look at the trees. Fortunately, even in San Diego, we have some trees that change coors and drop their leaves :) All three of us laid under a tree and looked up to see how the top of the tree was becoming bare and  how the leaves were changing colors and falling. Blue then rode her tricycle around while Baby Bear attempted to taste a few leaves.

Then we grabbed the stroller and went for a walk to collect some fallen leaves for another pinterest project I wanted to do. We only walked across the street, but Blue and I searched for and pointed out all the leaves that had changed colors and fallen. Across the street, a few of the trees looked gorgeous in reds and yellows! We found some great leaves to take home. Baby Bear enjoyed patting and petting the leaves and would "oooh" and squawk at the trees as we all looked up. We stopped for a bit of frozen yogurt -because, despite all these changing colors and falling leaves, it was still in the high 70s!! 

And when we got home, we enjoyed some chicken chili - again from pinterest! It was delicious and a great way to end the fall day - even if the weather was too hot to really feel "fall." :)