Shelly and her kids celebrate autumn with some seasonal activities in this guest post. They have lots of fun making some colourful autumn leaves using bleeding tissue paper and try some autumn acrostic poems too.
Making Leaves and Autumn Acrostic Poetry
By Shelly
Autumn is well and truly here so we thought we needed some autumn leaves on our windows. We decided to make them with the bleeding tissue paper method. My kids always love doing this.
To start with, they selected some leaf templates and a few acorns and we printed them out on to card. You do need card for this activity; paper does not work because you are going to wet it and it just gets soggy. We then selected some autumn coloured tissue paper and started adding pieces to the templates and then brushing over with water. You really don’t need to add a lot of water. Some of the colour from the tissue paper can get onto hands but it always washes off very easily. I have noticed that not all tissue paper seems to bleed nicely – the brighter colours tend to work better than the pastels but apart from that it has been a bit of trial to error to see which ones give the best effect. If you are wondering, we just used a cheap pack of mixed colours that I bought in a craft store.
Adding water to bleed the tissue paper
You can see the edges of the tissue paper beginning to bleed
Because our plan was to cut the templates out, we did not bother about sticking inside the lines.
Leaf templates with wet tissue paper
Once the card was dry we peeled off the tissue paper.
The reveal! It is always exciting to see the results!
And then cut them all out
Our finished leaves
I really love the effect that the bleeding gives – it is always different so you never get two items which look identical. We decided to hang ours up on the window and sliding doors just to give a bit of an autumn feeling.
Autumn leaves on the patio doors
Since we were in already in an autumn mood we decided to stick with it for our writing and choose some autumn-themed acrostic poems. We have done these before and the kids always enjoy them. I find it is a fun writing activity for kids who are reluctant writers.
The kids choose the autumn leaf poem, hedgehogs, bumble bees, fireworks and thunder.
Acrostic poem printables ready to use
My son started with the hedgehog acrostic.
Writing his hedgehog poem
If the kids are struggling to get started we found that it often helps to use the actual word of the poem as the first line – it just seems to get them going.
Writing an autumn poem
I like this writing activity because it is creative and they are practising their writing and spelling while having some fun thinking of ways to describe their topic. Also it tends to work well with mixed ages.
My daughter's bumble bee poem in progress
And just for fun we thought we would try and combine the two so we printed out the squirrel frame on some card and they used our bleeding tissue paper method to give it a cool autumn writing page effect.
Squirrel template with tissue paper bleed applied
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 8 and 10. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
