Making Tree Art in Preschool

This week we're talking about trees in Preschool.  Actually, it's been a two-week process, and this week we're really more focused on leaves.  However, it's hard to talk about leaves without referring to the trees, so it all gets covered this week.

Last week we took a "Tree Walk" and collected anything we could find that had to do with trees. Leaves, bark, branches, acorn, etc.  It all went into our collection.

We read tree books and talked about the parts of a tree.

This week we're moved on to tree art.

Our tree art was a two-step process.  The first day the Little People made the trunks.  This was after spending a little bit of time looking at the pictures in the book A Tree is Nice and talking about how trees in the book looked - with a main trunk and attached branches. Then I walked them through how you could tear up pieces of brown construction paper and make the trunk and branches from it.  

After that, I let them give it a try.

Here's what we got:

You can see that some of them got the idea of a main trunk with outgrowing branches:

While some of them - not so much:

Most of the Little People tore their paper, although a few of them chose to cut their paper with scissors.  I especially like the effort that this Little Person put into "fringing his tree branch" with scissors:

The second day of the project the Little People added their leaves to their trees.  Now, I have to give my two co-teachers some great credit here.  Even though they don't always "get" my goals to have child-directed art in our room, they let the kids put the leaves wherever they wanted (which was occasionally on the branches, but sometimes not:

This one is probably my favorite.  It's like a tree/fountain.

Picture perfect?  Nope.  Crafty?  Certainly not.  But child-directed?  Absolutely.  It's our (or at least my) favorite kind of art.