Here is a quick and easy was to dress up some found treasures for the holidays.
Earlier this fall the kids and I collected bags of pine cones. We ‘cleaned’ the pine cones by placing them on a baking sheet, lined with foil, in the oven at 200F for about 20min. This helps removes some of the sap and kill off any little critters or things (hate to say it… but I also didn’t want a bunch of bugs or worms or something all over my holiday table either). This will of course will also help ensure that they are completely open (see our nature study on pine trees for details).
I then used a spray adhesive (outside – I won’t let the kids near the spray adhesive) to cover the pine cones with glue. You could also use a watered down craft glue and brush. Then the kids got to sprinkle lots of glitter on the pine cones. They loved trying to completely cover them with the glitter.
If you want your pine cones to have a holiday scent I would suggest doing that first. You can brush on cinnamon essential oil and store them in a plastic bags for a couple weeks. See this site for directions. OR you could just buy the pre-scented cones from the craft store.
We will be using the pine cones individually as ornaments and in wreaths.
Close up of needles and pine cone.
I have decided to give our Nature Study time a little more focus than “Hey look… cool bug” (although we will still be doing that 😉 ) by joining in the Outdoor Hour challenges. This week’s theme was Pine Trees.
We chose a pine tree right outside our kitchen window. Which I believe is a Scotch Pine (feel free to correct me if I am wrong). I summarized the information given in Handbook of Nature Study to the kids and then we made some general observations ourselves.
Some of Our Observations:
Trunk splits at the top.
Needles in bundles of twos.
Needles about 3-5 inches long.
Hard, spiny pine cones.
Needles are flat on one side, rounded on the other.
Close up of the bark.
Great example of a split trunk top.
We talked about why the trunk might have split into two stems at the top. We talked about the pine cones why they might be hard and spiny. Then we took some stuff in to the kitchen table to observe closer.
We did a little experiment with the pine cone. I asked Bug for a hypothesis on what would happen if we put the open pine cone in a bowl of water. He said it would close up to keep the seeds dry (obviously something we have talked about before). Here is the pine cone we started with and what it looked like after 10 minutes in the bowl of water. It had indeed closed up.
Same Pine Cone: Dry & Open (10 minutes in water) Wet & Closed.