Autumn Art - Hibernation

I am always trying to think of new art ideas for Lily to do. I really love when I can also put a little lesson attached to the art we are doing too.

I love Autumn and so I definetly had to do something autumn inspired, and it was when picking a few red coloured leaves from the ground that I thought of doing an idea all about hibernation. 

The first thing we needed to do was go out and pick some lovely coloured leaves. There are so many nice colours in autumn. Reds, oranges, yellows, green's. And lucky for us that their are so many big tree's near our house that are loosing their leaves already. So we got a bucket and we headed out to go and get a bucket full. 

When we got them home, I sat down with Lily and decided to tell her all about how animals start to hibernate for the winter. Lily wanted to know what hibernating was and so I told her that it was a form of sleep that animals do so then they stay nice and warm and safe when it is really really cold out. We then discussed how the animals start to collect food and leaves and things to make nests to keep them selfs warm ready to hibernate. So I thought for our Autumn picture we could start by using the leaves to make nests. 

I got Lily a A3 piece of paper and some PVA Glue. Lily is super good at art now and started to stick her leaves onto the bottom of the paper to make her nest. Sticking is one of her favourite thing to do and so she was really enjoying getting to stick down the leaves she found outside. 

We then let the picture dry and went to the computer to print out an animal which hibernates. I gave lily a few options and she decided she wanted a Hedgehog. Of corse I could of drawn a hedgehog for Lily, but my drawing skills aren't all that good and so a printed one was the next option. 

I then cut the hedgehog out and Lily then started to colour in the face of it. I didn't want her to colour it all though as I was planning to use paint for the spikes of the hedgehog. After colouring it in, we glued it down so it looked like it was sat down on the leaves.

While the glue was drying, Lily and I got red and green paint to mix together to make a brown paint. Lily loves doing the mixing part and brown has always been a favourite colour to make as she loves painting tree's. 

For the spikes of the Hedgehog I thought it would look good if Lily used her handprints to make it look spiky. So she painted her hands and pressed them down all over the Hedgehogs back. I think the idea of the handprints didn't look as much as spikes as I wanted it too but it still looked great and made a really nice picture. 

Lily was really impressed with her picture and so we are going to make another one with a different animal soon.

Would your child enjoy an activity like this?