Kid’s Crafts, Nature Impressions

This week we are doing lots of garden activities. Yesterday, I shared about a free printable and game I made to help the kids learn to identify some of the plants that grown in our garden. Today, I’m sharing a craft we did with some of the leaves from our garden.

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This kid’s craft is an easy one. You can find almost everything you need right out in your own backyard. The only other item needed is some Sculpey clay.

Before we started to work with the clay, we headed outdoors to find some leaves to press into the clay. My kids picked out some fern leaves, a pine sprig, a mint leaf, a piece of bark and a few more items.

Once we had decided on our nature items to press into the clay, we headed back inside to start working with the clay. I had found a few small packages of clay on sale at Michael’s you can also purchase it at Amazon too. We had two colors to use yellow and white. I think the white actually shows the impressions better so it might be better to stick with white only.

I rolled a few small balls of clay and then used the bottom of the smooth glass to press them nice and flat. Then the kids started to create their designs. We also used the bottom of the glass to press the leaves into the clay evenly and to avoid too many fingerprints.

It worked really quite well, but for a few of them we needed to use the edge of a butter knife to get the leaves back out of the clay.

My son decided to make two of his clay impressions using a stick to draw a person. I think he just had fun squashing the clay beneath the stick. At one point he was pushing so hard he actually broke his stick in two.

My daughter took more care and deciding what she wanting in her scene. We did end up rolling the balls back up and pressing them out when the impressions didn’t come out quite like we wanted them.

I think the bark made the most interesting, imprint. Although the pine sprig makes a really nice pattern too. This was such a fun activity I could see us doing it again and making christmas tree ornaments out of them.

This could also be a good learning activity too. If you made the impressions with plants you know the names of. Then once the discs were baked, write the names of each of the plants,  on the back of each disk. The disks could then be used  to teach the names of each plant.

You could even make it into a game, guess the plant or something like that. It might be a fun game to add to plant unit study.

What’s a way you get your kids to learn more about nature while having fun? I would love to have you share your fun activities in the comments below.