Autumn Crafts – A Leaf Family

After such a gorgeous late summer, it’s hard to believe that autumn is here already! It felt like it happened over night. One day we had sand between our toes, now we are crunching through golden leaves in wellies. Here is an easy autumn crafts activity to get stuck into. It’s a great one to encourage little ones to notice the seasonal changes in their environment.

How to Make a Leaf Family

I love how you really don’t need much to be able to create a big leaf family.

You will need:

-Empty toilet rolls, one per leaf person.

-Leaves for the head and bodies.

-Googley eyes.

-Glue.

Looking for Leaves

Next time you are out and about, bring a little collection bag with you to gather up some of nature’s autumn treasures… leaves. We spent lots of time looking at all the different variations of colours and crunchiness.

If it’s been a damp day, try leaving your leaf collection out to air overnight so they are dry and ready for making a leaf family.

Let’s get making

To begin with, I set everything out (which isn’t much), on the table for easy reach. You really can’t go wrong with these. We spent some time considering which leaves would work best as head and bodies, and then set about gluing them directly onto the toilet rolls.

You could try painting the toilet rolls before doing this, but I found that even unpainted, the effects are still fab.

Once you are happy with your leaf bodies and heads, these will need to be left for a good few hours to completely dry. Little Button got carried away with the glue, so ours needed to be left overnight.

It’s the Little Things that make all the Difference

Once your leaf people are dry, whip out the glue again so you can stick on their eyes. You can make them as simple or elaborate as you like by adding extra accessories.

Ta-dah! Here is our little Leaf Family.

Pin me for later 😉

What do you think? The more haphazard they were, the better they seemed to turn out!