Silver Maple in the Moonlight
Maple trees as a nature study has to be about the easiest thing in the world to locate… at least in these parts! It has been a crazy hectic week and kinda yucky weather but fortunately we can see at least three maples out of every window in the house. We identified 4 different species on our evening walk last night including Silver Maple (tons in our yard and they drop seeds like rain in the spring), Sugar Maple, one that I think is a Black Maple and then some ornamental, non-native Amur Maple bushes. There is one more that I haven’t successfully IDed yet. We didn’t do a formal Nature Journal entry but instead played with different ways to capture the image of the leaf. We did Paint Spraying, Rubbings and Prints. We also made some cool Leaf T-shirts this past spring by making freezer paper stencils from real leaves (fun activity to try).
For our Paint Spray Images, we filled a squirt bottle with water and food coloring. We laid different leaves on a sheet of drawing paper (we were all out of water color paper, which is what I would recommend) and then squirted away. You don’t want it to get too wet or get the squirt bottle too close. We did this one outside.
We did some classic leaf rubbings using our homemade crayon blocks. For the girls, I taped the leaf to the table and then taped the paper down on top of it so it didn’t move around for them. That really helped a lot!
To make our leaf prints we covered the back side of a leaf with water color paints and then pressed it down on the sheet of paper. The Silver Maple Leaves looked really cool with this technique. Camp Creek Press had a nice blog about Water Color Nature Prints.
For our extra credit… of course we had real Maple Syrup. Waffles are the favorite for breakfast here. Do we get double points for having watched the syrup being made this spring? 😉 If you haven’t experienced Sugaring here are a couple photos. Unfortunately there is no way to share the wonderful smell of the sap boiling down over a fire, the sound of the crunch of icy snow underfoot, the feeling of the biting cold on your nose and the general excitement of the woods starting to stir again after a long winter.
We spent the morning at Gammy’s yesterday and took advantage of her seemingly endless supply of art materials (this time rummaging through her entire box of stamp pads). We made our apple prints to go along with our Week Four, Johnny Appleseed theme.
This was a very easy craft! All we did was take a couple apples and cut them in half (some lengthwise, some crosswise) and then used red and green ink pads. You have to press the apple very firmly to get a ‘full’ apple shape. Some we even had to rock slightly… I guess a straight cut really isn’t as straight as you think. If you take a close look, you can really see the star in the middle of some of the cross cut apple prints.
For Week Three our focus was on tractors/farm machines and the book Rusty, Trusty Tractor. To go along with this theme, our art project was Tracks in the Mud.
It was a beautiful day so we rolled out a large sheet of paper on the drive way, filled a baking pan with WASHABLE brown paint and then dipped a variety of items into the paint to make mud tracks on the page (you could easily do a scaled down version at the kitchen table but I do think it is important for big, messy art sometimes). This is one of those projects that is all about the PROCESS not the PRODUCT.
It was so much fun. By the end, the kids had gotten so into it… they were literally IN it and left their own tracks in the mud.
Normally art around here is basically free play. We get out the paints, play dough or crayons with little to no direction. But today I decided we were going to make more of lesson out it. So with aprons on, paper in front of them, I read the story “Mouse Paint” by Ellen Walsh. I then placed out red, blue and yellow paint. We each painted “mice” in the primary colors… and then mixed the paints to produce the secondary colored ‘puddles’ from the book.
I think all the kids enjoyed having a more structured art assignment and I am going to try and incorporate more lessons in art (or maybe more to the point… more art in lessons). Not all the time though. I still think they need plenty of free time with art, but maybe once a week I will have a destination in mind when we start.
I think it is fun to see the difference in the art produced from the kids at very different stages (spread over 3.5 years). My example is the one on top, then ‘A’, ‘L’ and ‘B’s.
