Winter Trees

Today we took down the Christmas decorations. Traditionally, I leave them up through New Years, but this year it feels like our house is over crowded with stuff, and the Christmas decor was just adding to the clutter, so it had to go. And since I was taking the decorations down, I also took down all the kids' Christmas art projects that were hanging in the kitchen window. After that I thought our window looked pretty bare. Plus, I like to have things hanging in the kitchen window because we live in the bottom of the apartment building and so people walk right by our window all the time to get to the mail boxes, and I feel like a gold fish at dinner time because our table is right next to the window, so we can pretty much make eye contact with everyone who walks by. But if I hang pictures up, the paper is just high enough so that it blocks people from being able to look in, and they look at our art work instead of us. And then I feel like we at least have some semi-privacy at dinner. (The people across the parking lot on the top floor can still see in our windows.)

Anyways, because of those two reasons, I decided to do an art project with the kids today so we'd have something to hang up that was wintery. I really like the hand print trees. We did one for fall. And I think the idea could be altered to work for spring and summer too, so I'm thinking that some day when I'm teaching a unit on seasons I'll be able to do these again to show all the seasons at the same time. But for today we just did winter.

To make a winter hand tree you just take a light blue piece of construction paper, cut it in half with a wavy line, and glue it onto a white piece of paper. Technically, the blue is supposed to be the sky and the white the snowy ground, which is how we did Lincoln's, but Ivan's got done upside down and I didn't notice until it was too late to fix it, so we just improvised with his, and I actually think it turned out just as good. Then you pick a hand and paint it brown and put a hand print down on the paper. Then finger paint a trunk. I helped Ivan with his, but Linc did his trunk all by himself. When the trees are dry, use a glue stick and put some glue everywhere in your picture that you'd want snow, the branches of the trees, falling from the sky, or in Ivan's case drifted on the ground, then sprinkle the glue spots with granulated sugar. Then shake the extra sugar off and you've got yourself a winter tree.