We have all seen paper cranes before, but this post is different in that it uses the method of making the paper crane to talk to your children about the disaster in Japan, as well as approaching the topic of death with your children. I would definitely leave the ‘age appropriateness’ up to the parent, but they have some great links on there, and the pictures are so detailed that hopefully we all could make these! The ‘helping’ part of his paper crane tutorial involves a link where you can send your cranes, and they will donate $2 for every crane…they are trying to reach 100,000 cranes! Head on over to Modern Parents, Messy Kids to learn more about this project.
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Leaf Activities That Don’t Use Real Leaves
The other day I shared some crafts involving fall leaves, but there are a lot of fun leaf-related activities that don’t use real leaves, so I wanted to share some of those, too.
Like these watercolor leaves from The Artful Parent. These are so pretty and would be great to make a garland or decorate the table for Thanksgiving. You could experiment with different kinds of paper, combine watercolors and crayons, use an eyedropper to apply liquid watercolors — there are lots of different ways to play with this one!
Because I’m a knitter of course I love any project that involves yarn, so this fall leaf lacing craft from Our Kid Things is right up my alley. The multicolored yarn they used is a lot of fun, or stick with fall colors. Either way it’s a great fine motor skill activity!
Using leaf shapes to make other crafts is a great way to incorporate leaves into the classroom without having to use actual leaves. For little kids this sensory painting activity from Kids Craft Room would be a lot of fun (I think this would be fun for some older kids and adults, too, to be honest) and makes a fun and easy decoration.
Of course leaf activities don’t just have to be crafts. Check out this great leaf matching game from Made to be a Momma. These leaves are so cute and after you’ve prepped the game you can play it over and over with no prep. Use fewer sets for younger kids and the full set for older ones.
You can also use leaf shapes in all sorts of learning activities, like in this fall leaf number tower activity from Fun Learning for Kids. There are leaves with single numbers on them that kids can use to stack cubes on in one-to-one correspondence, as well as ones that show dots like dice so kids can add up the numbers to build their stacks.
Thank you so much for including my post on your wonderful site!
Along with the how-to visuals and the links you mentioned, there is also info. on a great project aiming to collect 100,000 paper cranes from students world wide. For every crane collected, $2 is donated towards Japan disaster relief.
Thanks again.
Carters also has a paper crane tie in and thought it flies in the face of DIY I think it’s worth mentioning. You can also receive 10% off when you deliver your cranes. http://www.carters.com/Cranes-For-Kids/cranes-for-kids,default,pg.html