Concentric Leaf Shapes

Our sunshine returned today, along with the piles of leaves on my kitchen table, brought in by the children after some time outside.


I decided we'd use them for a leaf contour drawing exercise, I'd spotted on Art Projects for Kids.

Each child chose three leaves of different shapes, and arranged them a little way apart on a piece of paper.


They traces the leaves...


...and then started drawing concentric shapes around them...


...until they had completely covered their papers. Or, I should say until some of them covered their entire papers - C and D (ages 5 and 8) petered out after a couple of rounds, and switched to making leaf rubbings on their pages.


At this point I had planned on having those continuing turn their drawings into pictures of leaves on a pond, by shading their pages blue with the unwrapped edge of a crayon...


...then, if they wanted, retracing the lines with a marker, so they would show up better. And finally...


...gluing their leaves back down onto their original positions on the the page.


The children opted to color in the spaces between the lines with fall colors instead, or at least to start coloring in the spaces. I have a feeling they'll be at it for a while, but I think the end results ought to be pretty, in a groovy '70s kind of way.


It's great to be a homeschooler.