Eco Child’s Play

The leaves are falling from the silver maple trees today, and it’s my favorite time of the year. Autumn is a terrific season for experiencing with children, especially. Unlike the slowing down of winter and even the dawning of spring, sometimes, the seasonal change to autumn is an abrupt and vivid one–it’s so easy to remember summer, still, but so easy to see the turning and falling of the leaves and feel the nip in the air.

Because autumn itself is so tactile and sensorial, I take extra pleasure in exploring and celebrating it with my girls with some hands-on activities and projects. In accordance with our green crafting manifesto, we try to work primarily with natural and recycled materials, and to support a sense of ourselves as members of a global community; here are some things that we’ve done, that we like to do, and that we’re going to try this autumn:

• » See also: Open Ended Play Lets Kids’ Imaginations Set Sail!
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• You may need to make a leaf press first, but Martha Stewart has a tutorial for mounting an autumn leaf on a mat board decoupaged with similar leaves. She wants you, unfortunately, to buy your leaves from a craft store–yikes! Your favorite method of leaf preservation should work for this project, however, although it may not last as long as a picture made from store-bought(!) leaves.
• Particularly if you have a multi-cultural background or you or your kiddos are studying other cultures right now, participating in the autumnal celebrations of other cultures is one way of making the world a little smaller. The global Web site of the Yamaha Motor Company, of all places, has a section on paper crafts that features a cut-and-fold download of a mikoshi, a shrine used in the Japanese Autumn Festival. Older kids might find this a very absorbing project to complete on their own; for little monkeys like mine, I like to print out a couple of extra copies for them to “work on” and totally destroy while I painstakingly fuss over the real version.
• The Artful Parent, one of my favorite mom bloggers, made her daughter this felt board with a big felt autumn tree and lots of littler felt leaves to arrange on the branches or let fall into a big felt leaf pile that the little felt children can run through. We’re big into leaf identification at our house these days, so how cool would it be to have different leaf sets for the tree–oak, maple, bay, etc.? Yeah, it would be very cool.
• Soulemama, and also in her book The Creative Family, talks at length about the nature table–a special spot for bringing and celebrating the outdoors in the home. Fallen leaves and pretty rocks and pinecones and nuts live there, as well as seasonal artwork and little acorn people and the acorn people’s friend, Stuffed Squirrel.
• Clove apples, or pomanders, as elsie marley calls these oranges, is a nice way to preserve some of the harvest bounty, especially if you live in a place in which it’s apple-picking time right now. I sit down next to a little girl for this activity and poke in a toothpick first where she wants to stick her clove, but older children can certainly be their own clove-stickers.
• Another leaf activity that produces a beautiful result is leaf printing, from Skip to My Lou. It teaches basic printmaking, and it encourages some real close-up examination of the intricacy of the leaves, which are artwork in themselves, as well as printed onto fabric or cardstock.

Along with raking and leaf-jumping and tree climbing and apple eating, of course, these are a few of our favorite autumn projects–what are yours?

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