Fun Fall leaves

I found this idea on a great blog that I follow. The Chocolate Muffin Tree always has fun kid's art and science projects to try. Now we have done the washable markers on coffee filters before, but this time we made leaves!

I laid out sheets of newspaper on our coffee table, drew leaf shapes on coffee filters, and pulled out some fall colors out of our washable marker bin. I showed the kids what to do, and they were off. They had tons of fun playing around with color combinations, and L discovered that if you just leave the marker on the filter, the ink will expand. This was fun to see because he never really paid attention to that kind of stuff before. But then that also resulted in a fight over the one skinny brown marker because "that is the only one that does it". It didn't matter that I told them all the markers do that. Oh well!

 After we colored in our leaves, we sprayed them with a mist of water out of a spray bottle I picked up at Dollar Tree. I had picked it up this summer and kept in full of water in the fridge so we could spray ourselves cooler in the hot weather. Now it will be used for crafts!

 We let them dry on the newspaper, with the windows open. Once the filters were dry, each child cut out their own. We put double sided tape on the back and put them up on the back door. It looks great, and really makes the house feel like fall!