From Pinterest to Real Life: Trying out Some Watercolor Leaves in Preschool

Despite the fact that our temperatures have been very warm here lately, we actually spotted a few fall-colored leaves on campus yesterday.  The Little People seemed delighted to discover that this fall-phenomenon that I've been talking about actually happens.  In turn, their excitement set off a frenzy of fall activities in our room.

One of these activities is our liquid watercolor leaves.  I decided to follow the example that I pinned some time ago on Pinterest:

Source: havingfunathomeblog.blogspot.com via Julie on Pinterest

I already had ordered some fall leaves to use, although you also can cut your own.  The person who made the leaves in the Pinterest post cut leaves from coffee filters, which is a great idea. You can also cut them from tissue paper, but be aware that there is "bleeding" tissue paper and "non-bleeding" tissue paper.  You won't get much color spread from the non-bleeding kind.  (Found this out the hard way.)

Anyway, here are my precut leaves:

Following the examples of the Pinterest leaf-maker, I "drew" the veins on the leaves with my hot glue gun:

Just so you'll know, I have discovered that you can use regular glue to make these veins.  However, the water in the watercolors will make the glue gummy again.  However, this is only a problem if you lay your still-wet and gummy leaf down on paper to dry, thus gluing the leaf to the paper.  If you put the wet leaf on something plastic, you should be fine.

The next step was for the Little People to add to the color.  I used our Liquid Watercolors from Discount School Supply:

Yes, I see the poor grip and the paintbrush mashing.  But look at the colors!

We found that a little bit of color went a long way. We let them dry, then hung them on our windows:

 Aren't they beautiful?  We love them.

Here is my Pinterest Project Tryout on this activity: