Autumn Leaf Threading

Sometimes I just need to find a good excuse to brave the freezing weather and get everyone outside. On the weekend that reason was autumn leaves… we needed to collect autumn leaves.

I wasn’t exactly sure why we needed autumn leaves, it just seemed like an important thing to do before they all fell from the trees and turned into a slippery mushy brown mess on the ground.

After putting fifty-gazillion layers of clothes on all the kids, and only ten-gazillion on myself (which really was an over-site) and attempting to bribe Noey with chocolate chips to keep his hat on (which didn’t work once the chocolate was gone… duh!) we headed into town to the park.

The kids raced around collecting leaves, watched the cockies tear up the pine cones and drop bits on our heads, and had a quick play on the equipment. Once my fingers were blue and the toddlers snot had frozen to his face (it was cold ok) we piled back into the Big White Bus and came home… with a HUGE bag of autumn leaves.

“So what are we going to do with all the leaves Mum?”

Um…. er…. um…. then inspiration struck and I went to find the hole punch.

Two days, lots of searching, and finally a trip to the shops later, with a brand new hole punch in hand Morgan set about punching holes in some of the Autumn leaves. We were going to thread them!

As Morgan worked on his fine motor and problem solving skills with the leaves and hole punch, I dug around in the cupboard for some beads, buttons and other thread-able items in ‘autumn colours’. We also discovered we could punch holes in the bits the cockies had stripped off the pine cones too, bonus!

Armed with some plastic threading ‘strings’ (The plastic ‘strings’ are stiffer and make it easier for little fingers to thread. You can buy packets of plastic string at craft shops or you can buy a roll of cheap whipper-snipper cord at the two dollar shop which is just as good) Morgan, and Noah (with a lot of help from me) had a lovely time making autumn leaf threadings.

We were going to use them as necklaces but when the sun shone through the window we decided they would look lovely hung up in the sunshine…

Now what to do with the rest of the autumn leaves?
Here are some autumn activities we’ve done in the past. (How cute was my big boy when he was little!)

Autumn crowns and autumn leaf collage.