Giant Tree Craft ~ Nature Craft for Kids

If you're looking for a simple and fun craft to do with your kids, look no further! This Giant Tree craft involves exploring nature, gathering leaves, exploring textures, crayon rubbing, creating mixed media art, and of course, the end result is a giant tree!

We had a lot of fun making this nature craft - My three-and-a-half year old loved it the most, whereas my 18-month old probably didn't get quite as much out of it, but he had fun scribbling and stepping on it at any rate... An older kid could probably get a lot more creative with the rubbings and make it look amazing! I wrote up a quick how-to guide below, and tried to note some of the ways it could be modified to suit your needs. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Location, Location, Location

As the name suggests, this is a GIANT tree, so you'll need a big area to lay down your paper. A deck is the ideal location, because you can use the wood grain texture to do your tree trunk crayon rubbing, but any hard ground will do (driveway, patio, sidewalk). I preferred to do this outside because toddlers + glue + leaves, but you could also do this in a garage, or any place inside that has hard floors. 

Materials

• Big roll of paper (we use newspaper end rolls, check with your local newspaper print shops) 
• Scissors
• Tape
• Crayons
• Leaves (enough to fill up a small basket or pail)
• Glue 

Steps

1. Gather leaves and craft materials. We used maple leaves from the little saplings we have springing up all over our yard.

2. Tape down a long sheet of paper for the tree trunk. Draw a trunk outline with crayon. Use the side of the crayon to rub a wood texture into the trunk. If you aren't doing this on a deck, you could try laying down some bark or a board under the paper to rub, or have your kids study the pattern of bark and try to draw it on the trunk. 

Laying down the trunk paper.

Check out that wood grain!

3. Arrange half the leaves (we saved the other half to glue on top at the end) around the top and upper sides of the tree trunk. Tape down sections of paper on top. I used three panels: one on each side of the trunk and a long one across the top. Rub with crayons. The downside to the deck is the wood grain will come through a bit here too! 

Arranging the leaves.

Leaf rubbing with green crayons.

4. Use a glue stick to attach the remaining leaves to the top of the paper. Of course, if you want to simplify you can always skip this step and call it a day with just the rubbing textures. Or vice versa, if you want to focus entirely on drawing and gluing, you could ditch the rubbing elements. Or you could make it more elaborate, practice tracing leaves, incorporate blossoms, or make it a specific type of tree... the world is your oyster, or something.

Gluing leaves.

That’s it! If you try this giant tree craft, drop a comment, I’d love to hear how it turns out!