One of our favourite pass times is playing in one of the many woodland areas around us in Hampshire and Surrey. The bonus of this - apart from being entirely free - is that we can spend hours in the morning rummaging around, walking, foraging, and playing, regardless of the weather, and then take bits of the forest home for our crafts. It's both educational and fun.
Today's craft is super easy.You will need:
- Leaves of different sizes and colours
- Glue
- Googly Eyes
- Lollipop Sticks
To start with, go outside and see what diverse range of leaves you can find. We were doing other things today so just picked up leaves on the way to the car and they were all relatively similar, but still worked well.
I made the first Leaf Man, and my daughter was soon making her own leaf men too.
Instructions are so easy they seem silly to write out, but here you go.
(I found the glue didn't work too well, so swapped to Pritt, which did the trick)
1. Rub the glue on the stick, and gently put the leaf on it. Leave it to dry for a few minutes while you do the rest.
2. Pop glue on the googly eyes and place them on the leaves.
If you were that way inclined, you could draw a mouth, eyebrows and a nose on the leaf or the lollipop stick, but we were quite happy with just eyes.
In the original, they also coloured the sticks. Perhaps with an older child that would be good, but my 2 year old had enough just with gluing.
Once we were done and they were dry, we used the Leaf Men as puppets, which she loved and giggled the whole way through me just talking about our day in stick men voices. In the image above, her Leaf Man is running, apparently, to get into the pictures too. What a great way to encourage imaginative play!
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