Autumn EYFS Ideas - Leaf Rubbing Bouquet

This week our beloved Granny Jan is coming to stay, and I thought we could do a bit of a combo activity in anticipation of her arrival.

Before I go any further I should say most of the photos used in this post were taken by my boys themselves...

This activity has a three pronged attack:

It’s a sneaky way to get everyone (especially rufty tufty little boys) interested in mark making

It’s a good way to think and talk about Autumn

It’s good excuse to go outdoors and run around

You Will Need: Leaves, Paper, Wax Crayons (cheap soft ones work well), Drinking straws, Sellotape and Scissors.

So, firstly, you want to go out for a nice long walk (preferably somewhere where there’s deciduous trees!) and gather up some leaves. Nice flat freshly fallen ones work well. It’s nice to have a variety of leaf species, and you could take a ‘leaf identification guide with you’. (An extension to this would be to take the camera, get the kids to photograph the leaves and the trees they came from, and then create your own identification guide on the computer at home).

Once home, get your leaves dried off and lay them out, let your children pick the leaves they want, place them under the paper (you need to be leaning on a hard surface!) and then let the leaves magically appear by rubbing a wax type crayon over the paper. Top Tip – Most leaves are constructed so the ridges are more prominent on the underside of the leaf – so tuning your leaf over under the page gets a more dramatic result.

My boys LOVED doing this activity, they spent a considerable amount of time choosing, placing and rubbing over the different leaves. Neither boy has a particularly long attention span, and writing drawing is all a bit blahblahblah to them just now, so to see them concentrating in this way was a nice change!

Once we’d done lots of rubbings of lots of leaves we cracked out the scissors. These are an activity in themselves, both boys love the scissors, and getting fingers in the right holes, holding the paper steady and cutting in the right direction is a challenge in itself. I let them go for it though and with a bit of assistance we some had some (rather odd shaped) leaves cut out at the end.

Next up is tape the leaves to the straws – again sellotaping is fun activity at any time all by itself so we had fun taping the leaves on the straws to make the ‘stems’ of our bunch. By this point my youngest decided that using his leaf to flag down imaginary trains was more fun so he tore around the house doing that for a while.

All finished, the jug was carried with the greatest of ceremony upstairs, they took it in turns to carry it every few steps and placed on grannies bedside table ready for her.

Safe to say that as soon as granny arrived the first thing they wanted to do was show her the autumn leaf bouquet!