Leaf Faces

The weather has changed.

The early mornings are cold and the grass is soaked in dew. A sunny day no longer means sunscreen and hats and swimming pools. The grass in the park is littered with acorns and the leaves are changing colour.

I can’t pretend it is summer any longer, autumn is here.

The long hot days of summer are my favourite, and it’s hard not to feel negative when the days get shorter and the weather cooler. But autumn is beautiful here, with huge old trees putting on a show, it feels like nature is waving a flag in our faces begging us to notice, so we did.

The boys and I ran around the park marvelling at the colours, floating sticks down the creek swollen by recent rain, and collecting autumn all kinds of treasures. We came home with a big bag of leaves, acorns, and more, ready to create.

This is such a simple creative activity – just a big pile of autumn treasures and the suggestion to make faces.

What you collect will depend on where you live and what time of the year it is.

Our autumn nature collection included:

leaves in all sizes shapes and colours
sticks
acorns
seed pods
pine cones

You could also collect:

flowers
vines
fruit
seeds

We used large sheets of plain paper to ‘frame’ our faces.

We decided not to stick down our creations so that we could reuse the items and the paper over and over.

You could use a little bit of glue to hold your creations in place if you wanted to keep them, or use clear contact paper, sticky side up.

You could also try one of these options for how to preserve leaves for crafting to make your leaf faces last even longer!

This activity is perfect for any age and works great when you have a group of kids of various ages. It’s easy enough for little hands to manage, and challenging enough to keep older kids engages.