Materials
- small twigs
- construction paper
- white paint
- q-tips
- glue
Directions
- Head outside for a quick search for fallen twigs and sticks. We found lots of small sticks laying on the ground near our bushes and under trees. Kids will love going on this outdoor scavenger hunt that will soon be turned into art!
- Once your twigs are collected, take a moment to examine them. Take notice of their similarities and differences. Lengths and thickness. We grabbed our hand held magnifying glass to take an even closer look.
- After the fun of collecting and examining has been had, begin by designing the layout of your wintry tree. We discussed parts of a tree prior to doing this. It helped us in selecting a thicker, bigger stick to represent the base of the tree. We used smaller, thinner twigs and placed them carefully above branching off in all directions.
- Now that a design is in place, you can start gluing it down. We first poured some liquid glue onto a paper plate and dipped a q-tip in it to help place the glue. Making sure that you apply glue to the part of the twig that lays flat onto the construction paper is very important!
- Allow students to repeat the steps of gluing and placing until their wintry tree is beautifully glued down. You may want to give it some time to dry prior to adding the “snow.” This helped us in avoiding any mishaps with bumping the tree branches out of place.
- For the final touch on this winter tree art activity, use a q-tip to make it snow all around the tree! Grabbing the q-tip and carefully dipping and blotting it onto the paper is excellent fine motor practice for tiny hands.
- It was suggested by one of our artists that we should make some snow on the ground. What a great idea! We added some mounds of “snowflakes” around the tree to make it look like it had been snowing for awhile.
Credit: https://www.fantasticfunandlearning.com/winter-tree-art-kids.html