Category: autumn

Crafts for Thanksgiving – Chapter 1.

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I’m not sure if E. understands the concept of being thankful, though one night when we talked to the Angels I wanted to say good night and she said:

– Wait, Mommy!
– Yes?
– I want to say thank you.
– What for?
– For the skeleton costume.

So I might be wrong. She can also say thank you whenever I give her some food or a toy. Sometimes she reminds Daddy to say thank you.

I told her the Thanksgiving story very basically though we focused more on being creative this time.

Colour your turkey – letter recognition

I mentioned to E. that American people celebrate Thanksgiving with turkeys, like we celebrate Martin-day with geese.

So we coloured a turkey. I printed an image of a turkey from the net, but before we started I added some letters to different parts of the turkey. With some of the dot markers I signed orange, yellow, red and purple next to the turkey. She immediately understood how to colour it. We have no brown dot markers so I used a crayon.

identifying the letters
staring with yellow
our colourful turkey



Bubble wrap paint turkey

I found this idea on craftymorning.com . I’m not going into details as you find easy-to-follow instructions on the site.

It looked great, so we tried it. It’s a little too complicated with a 2 and a half year old. You need to wait a lot for the paint to dry. E. had no patience. But she enjoyed the painting. I had no dark brown coloured paper so we painted the body too. (The thermo-hat is due to an ear infection)

painting the body
adding the eyes on the stool – where else?
finished with the beak too, though there’s no snood
I cut the feathers – she did the sticking
Turkey without legs and snood





























Autumn tree variations

The first tree idea came when E. enjoyed me punching leaf shapes with this.

So while she was asleep in the afternoon I punched some more leaves (yellow, red, orange, brown and creamy colours) and I put them together with some real dry leaves next to a drawn tree. With the help of some glue we put the leaves onto the tree’s branches. She wasn’t interested in the real ones.

Broken leaves had to go on the ground, under the tree

Our nanny arrived and they went on together

Have you noticed that some leaves are falling down 😉 ?

“Nice tree. Can I pee on it?”

The second tree is based on the same idea as the dot marker turkey. I drew a tree and on the branches I wrote the first letters of some colours. Dotting fun.

I’m planning to make some more Thanksgiving activities. So come back for the autumn tree and turkey of gratitude.

Some more autumn crafts

Published on by nonnativemommyLeave a comment

As I said before I love autumn. Not only is it beautiful but also gives us a lot to talk about and plenty of opportunities to be creative.

Here come our new projects concerning autumn:

  • Very Hungry Caterpillar out of conkers and dried orange slices (googly eyes, pipe cleaners and glue sticks).
I made holes in the conkers with a screwdriver
threading the conker
then the orange slice
gluing the eyes on
caterpillar heads
caterpillar bodies
Let’s make them friends
  •  Autumn Nature Hunt – one day when we came home from the nursery I’d packed a bucket for E. to be able to collect whatever she found on the way home. (More simple picking and collecting whatever we find; not as directed and focused as the Tray Nature Hunt we did in the spring)
The next day we were sorting, grouping and naming them:
end result
playing with autumn shadows

We covered a great number of autumn vocabulary (leaves, trees, berries, colours – just to list few topics), and also the process of sticking, gluing, sprinkling, threading. I’ve just realised that E. is more and more interested in short craft projects and it means a lot of language input. We won’t stop. I’ll come back with more.

Autumn leaves are falling down

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My favourite season has arrived and it seems E. is enjoying it a lot, too. On the way home from the nursery we always collect some things (leaves, berries, conkers, bark pieces, stones etc.) to play or to do some craft projects with.

I put some contact paper on the window (sticky side out) and on a tray I prepared all the leaves we’d collected. And the sticking started.

Daddy assisted the little artist.

Art critic: Doggie. He sniffed the leaves then moved away.
Final art piece: Autumn leaves are falling down (and some petals)

Another project of ours with the autumn leaves was making a hedgehog. I saw this ideas here. (You can find a hedgehog template there that you can easily print.)

I drew three hedgehogs (as this was also a family project) and we glued the leaves on their backs.

Serious gluing in process

Final pieces of art

Another leaf craft we’ve made with crepe paper:

More gluing and more sticking

End result 🙂

More autumn crafts are on their way. Stay tuned!