More Autumn Decorations and Apples, Apples, Apples

Autumn Hand Wreath

Today Hazel and I focused on apples and did some painting crafts. Now apples are one of Hazel's favorite foods. She has one at least once a day. My mother-in-law now keeps apples at her house for Hazel, and she never has fruit in her house. So today we started by reading the story, The Little Red House With No Doors and No Windows and a Star Inside. And of course we cut the apple sideways to see the star inside. We then pulled out white paper and red paint and did some apple prints. While we had the paint out we also did some mushroom prints with mushroom tops from our yard, leaf prints, acorn prints, etc. and used an apple cookie cutter.

Our Mushroom Tops and Apple Halves

Hazel with one of her many paintings

Our next craft we saw on Smilemonsters: Fun For Kids Friday. It was shared by Boredom Busting Mommy. You take craft foam leaves and put one in a plastic bag. You put a little paint of various fall colors in the bag as well and seal the bag. Then you squish the paint around in the bag to get the leaf covered. Then carefully (and usually messily) remove the leaf and put it on wax paper to dry. This was a fun craft. The only problem I had was trying to find foam leaves. Since I couldn't find any I bought a few sheets of the foam in autumn colors and cut out my own leaves using the templates from Mom On Timeout's Stained Glass Fall Leaves. After the leaves dried we glued them onto a paper plate with the center circle cut out and added a sign saying Falling for Autumn.

Apple prints and apple cookie cutter

Mushroom, leaves, pine needles, cookie cutter, acorns, etc.

Leaf in bag with paint

Hazel squishing the bag

A couple of the leaves with wet paint

Leaves on plate

Our finished wreath (letting the glue dry)

Continuing on our apple theme, we went to the farmer's market and got apple cider and apple cider donuts (and fresh apples of course). We also made a stained glass apple. The glue is still drying, but it came out nicely. We used the template provided on DLTK-Kids. They have directions there as well.

Stained Glass Apple

Peek-a-boo Worm Apple

 I also made Hazel an apple with a peek-a-boo worm as shown on All Kids Network.We also talked about the seeds and core and did the craft from Mrs. Nelson's Class. We drew in the seeds.

Hazel's apple with core

We also went to the library and got a few books out on apples or including them in the story. We got An Apple Festival: Orchards in Autumn by Lisa Gabbert, I Am an Apple by Jean Marzollo (the librarian suggested this one, but wasn't sure if it would be too much for Hazel's age), Orange Pear Apple Bear by Emily Gravett, and The Terrible Plop by Ursula Dubosarsky. We have only read two of them so far, but she seemed to like them.

Tomorrow we will continue our apple theme and talk more about apples growing on trees and doing some of the tree crafts. We will also make the whole wheat apple muffins for Thursday morning and if the weather is nice, maybe we will go to a farm and see some apple trees and pumpkin patches. Next week I want to focus on pumpkins.

 Oh, and since we had extra craft foam we traced Hazel's hand and cut out 9 of them to make a wreath. Then I added a Happy Autumn to it. See the picture at the top of the page. See below for the pdf of the signs I used on the wreath.

Enjoy!!
Wreath Signs 

Editorial Note: This post was updated on August 19, 2018. Links were removed if they were no longer functioning.