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  • Banner with colorful artwork promoting an art shop featuring kindness coloring pages, artist activities, and resources for teachers.

Fall Still Life Paintings with Kids

Colorful still life with fruits, flowers, a golden goblet, and a decorative spray on a vibrant gradient background, evoking the essence of fall.

My third, fourth and fifth grade students just finished up these gorgeous fall still life paintings. Over the years I have built up a collection of fall decorations, artificial leaves, pumpkins and gourds.  I also brought in some real pumpkins and gourds as well.  If you want to do some seasonal art and still have solid art standards covered, observational drawing is always a good go-to lesson. For this project, we talked a little about arrangement and composition, which usually … Read more…

Printmaking with Apples: Pumpkin Jack-o-Lanterns

Child's drawing of six orange Jack-o-Lanterns with various facial expressions on a green background.

This was a fun introduction to printmaking.  I did this project with Kindergartners.  I got the idea from this image on Pinterest. I read them The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons.  I cut apples in half and the students dipped them into orange paint and stamped them on their paper.   The next art class, I provided them with printouts of images I found online of jack-o-lanterns and the students used markers to draw faces and stems on the pumpkins. … Read more…

Salt and Watercolor Fall Leaves

Salt and Watercolor Fall Leaves

I came across this beautiful technique at the Happy Hooligans blog.  She practiced letter writing with glue, salt and paint.   I thought this technique would be a fun experiment for my third graders and make beautiful fall leaf paintings. Here’s how this works.   First, we used real fall leaves for inspiration while drawing.  We drew leaves with pencil on watercolor paper.  Then, we used regular Elmer’s white glue to outline the leaves. While the glue was still wet, we poured … Read more…

Fall Leaf Printable

Fall Leaf Printable

Aren’t the colors of the fall leaves breathtaking?  I scanned some of the leaves that I found on the trees here in Wisconsin.  Feel free to print these out, color designs on them with permanent or paint markers, make a collage or just draw from the pictures.  They would also look good on a bulletin board. Download the higher resolution version here at TPT for free!   The book Leaf Man, by Lois Elhert, would be a great way to … Read more…

  • Banner with colorful artwork promoting an art shop featuring kindness coloring pages, artist activities, and resources for teachers.