Green, Fall Craft Projects for the Classroom

School is in full swing and as those calendar pages keep turning, the fall leaves will soon follow suit. Arts and crafts are an excellent way to explore the changing seasons in the classroom. Keeping classroom crafts green teaches students good stewardship and almost always saves school money too. While the leaves are turning red, orange, brown and yellow, you can stay "green" in the classroom.

Colorful fall tree collages from magazine print help imaginations take shape.

Collages are not a new idea but in this age where preassembled crafts kits abound, collages are a great way to let students experience the process of creating art. From finding the colorful materials, to using fine motor skills for cutting or tearing shapes, collages mean that just like the trees in nature, no two fall tree collages will be just alike.

Materials:

-Recycled paper for the background

-Magazines

-Scissors

-Glue

-Pencils

Directions:

Encourage students sketch out the basic shape of a their tree on the clean side of their recycled paper and search magazines for interesting colors and textures to cut and glue onto their tree skeleton. It's fun for students to see that a red sweater or a brown car can be "recycled" into a fall tree.

Take it big and create a green fall bulletin board.

Using these same techniques, your class can work together on one large tree to create a green bulletin board for fall. Newsprint makes an amazing tree trunk. You can skip the corrugated border and keep adding "leaves."

Materials:

Newspaper

Brown paper bags

Magazines

Pencils

Scissors

Directions:

Brainstorm ways to cover the back of the bulletin board without using bulletin board paper. Since we are celebrating trees in our arts and crafts projects, this is the perfect time to teach students to save trees too.

One successful idea is to cover the bulletin board with newsprint and use brown paper bags for the tree trunk. Trying it the other way around works too.

Create the tree trunk first so that students have an idea of the scale for leaves. A good guideline is to make leaves about the size of their hand. In fact, they can bring their fingers together and trace them for a fun leaf shape.

Get the family involved with "green" homework for fall crafts.

Materials:

Vary

This is one homework assignment that will be fun and easy but challenges creativity as well. Ask students to bring in a hand-sized "leaf" for your bulletin board border that is cut out from a recyclable or a reusable material.

Directions:

Allow each student to present the "green" leaf that is actually brown, orange, red or yellow. Let other students guess what purpose the material originally served. Add these leaves to your fall bulletin board for a colorful "green" border.

Some of my favorite examples from students include a brown leaf from a burlap seed bag and a bright red leaf from a coffee bean bag.