Fun Art Activities for Kids, Inspired by Nature
Following May’s Leaf Nature Hunt post, we now follow up with some fabulously creative activity ideas inspired by the leaves children have collected. It’s the perfect time for such activities as summer gradually makes way for autumn, and leaves naturally fall all around. Not only are today’s activity ideas fun and creative for little ones, but they also make a vital link in children’s minds between The Great Outdoors and art. Such a link has been present for centuries, so this is a great opportunity to introduce the theme to youngsters. With these simple leaf-inspired ideas, children will benefit from nature, inspire their creative minds, boost their imaginations, and even develop new creative and motor skills. So, let’s get creative today with leaves! Take a look at the activity ideas below.
Step 1 for Children: Collect Some Leaves!
Children will need some leaves for these ‘leaf art’ activities. We suggest they collect a wide selection of shapes, sizes, and varieties, so they have the flexibility to undertake any of the leaf art activities below. Our free leaf reference poster should help. Adult supervision* is, of course, required for young children foraging for leaves outdoors; there are many hazards out there.
Step 2: Gather Art Materials
Children will need the relevant art materials for their leaf art. These may include non-toxic paint, pencils, or crayons, as well as paper and potentially child-safe glue, depending on the activities undertaken.
Step 3: Make Some Leaf Art!
Once children have gathered everything they need, it’s time to get creative! Here are a few ‘leaf art’ ideas to get them started.
Make a Leaf Collage
Whether fresh, dried, or pressed (see below), leaf collages can be used to make wonderful pictures and designs. With a little imagination, leaves can suddenly resemble little trees and landscapes, or be combined into formations that depict a flower head or a graphical design. The accompanying images show a couple of examples to get children’s creative juices flowing.
TIP: For more permanence, use dried or pressed flowers glued to paper or card. For greater creativity, add extra elements like dried/pressed flowers, or other elements like twigs and dried grass stems. Children should feel free to draw their own additions too, for example, the ground level, hill shapes, the horizon, drawn animals, or children playing ball under leaf ‘trees’.
Paint & Decorate Leaves
One of the most straightforward creative activities with leaves is simply to paint and decorate them with coloured paints. Doing so can create highly attractive groups of leaves that are fun and cheerful to look at. Experiment with flat colours or more intricate decorations such as polka dots, stripes, stars, or zigzags. Glue the finished leaves to paper or card once dry to use them as part of a leaf collage (see above).
TIP: Dried or pressed leaves may help coloured paint adhere more easily to the leaves; however, they may become more fragile if dried, so handle with care!
Discover Leaf & Flower Pressing
Leaves and small flowers can be dried, flattened, and kept longer by pressing them. Once pressed and dried, they’re like little works of art in themselves and are quite delightful. They can be kept as bookmarks or keepsakes, or used as art and collage components for some of the other leaf activities outlined today.
HOW? Simply place leaves and small flowers individually between the pages of an ideally unprinted notebook or sketchbook, or in between sheets of unprinted newsprint, blotting, or cartridge paper. Place a heavy, flat weight on top — books usually suit perfectly — and leave for anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks, depending on the thickness and moisture levels of the contained leaves/flowers.
Do a Leaf Rubbing
Leaf rubbing is a simple yet effective art activity involving leaves. First, simply place a leaf under a sheet of fairly thin paper. Holding the paper still with one hand, children should use their writing hand to rub a crayon, pastel, charcoal stick, or soft pencil lead over the area where the leaf sits, scribbling from left to right in closely aligned lines. A ‘picture’ of the underlying leaf will gradually appear!
TIP: Use leaves with a defined texture and structure for the best effect. Use different colours for added interest.
Print with Leaves
Leaf printing is super-easy and fun for little ones. Find a suitable leaf and, using a broad brush or — better still — paint roller, paint the most textured side of a leaf with a thin layer of paint, ensuring it covers the whole side of the leaf. Then, while the paint is still wet, place the painted side carefully over a sheet of blank paper. Without moving its position, press all parts of the leaf down so the paint makes contact with the underlying paper. Another way to accomplish this is to use a clean roller to ‘roll’ over the leaf so it connects the paint with the paper. Carefully remove the leaf and — hey presto — you should have an image of the leaf structure and texture right there on the paper. Try different leaves, various colours, and overlapping experiments to accomplish different outcomes.
TIP: Textured leaves with defined structures and veins work best. Often, the underside of a leaf is more defined. Leaf printing can be used to make pictures too, like in some of the other activities featured today.
Make Art Inspired by Leaves
Instead of painting or using leaves directly, children can also try to depict them with their own paintings and drawings. These are a good way to encourage children to focus on getting the shape and details correct, fine-tune hand-eye coordination, and bolster technical mark-making skills. And, because children are free to paint or draw however they like, they can let their imaginations run riot and perhaps invent their own leaf shapes, leaf patterns, and natural worlds on paper.
TIP: If you, the parent, have some creative skills, try demonstrating with your own leaf drawing or painting first. Explaining what you’re focusing on and how you’re achieving things along the way may help children better understand how they might approach the activity themselves.
Create Greeting Cards Using Leaves
Children can use some of the creative skills they’ve learnt in the activities above to make greeting cards that feature their leaf art. For example, they can forage for heart-shaped leaves and paint them cerise pink to use as part of a simple Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day greeting card. More general greeting cards for other special occasions can also be accomplished using leaves and dried flowers — for example, arranged to depict a leaf or dried ‘bouquet’ on a card sent for a birthday.
TIP: Try doing an image search on your preferred search engine to find other examples of leaf and flower art to inspire your child’s own creations.
Leaf Art Provides Many Benefits to Children
Leaf art activities like these may seem simple, but they provide many potential benefits to children, including under-fives. Getting out in nature to forage for leaves is, in itself, beneficial in a huge number of ways, including through exercise, greater well-being, fresh air and freedom, and even a boost to academic grades, to name but a few. See our article The Importance of Nature in Early Childhood for more details.
The leaf art itself also benefits children in a wide variety of ways, and supports many of the aims of the EYFS curriculum. From practising hand-eye coordination, honing fine motor skills, and stimulating imaginations, to opportunities for self-expression, creativity, expanded language, and interpersonal communication, these simple activities offer huge benefits to little ones — naturally. Spring, summer, and autumn are the perfect times for such activities, so why not get your child inspired with some leaf art soon? Enjoy!
Little Acorns Nursery, Hindley Green
A Year-Round Childcare Service for Children Under Five
Little Acorns Nursery in Hindley Green provides a high-quality weekday childcare service virtually all year round. With its home-from-home environment, excellent facilities, and extensive outdoor grounds, children have fun while their learning and development are carefully nurtured by high-quality early years practitioners. At Little Acorns, every child receives the support and care they need to be as school-ready as possible by the time they leave us to begin formal education. Little Acorns Nursery supports funded hours for eligible children from the age of just 9 months.
To register your interest, apply for a nursery place, arrange a visit, or simply ask any questions, please get in touch today:
Our nursery in Hindley Green serves people from the Wigan, Bolton, and Greater Manchester areas, including Bickershaw, Leigh, Atherton, Westhoughton, Ince-in-Makerfield, Platt Bridge, and Tyldesley.
*Safety Notice
Children, especially the young, should be accompanied by an adult at all times when exploring and playing outdoors. Supervising adults should teach children about potential dangers, including poisonous berries, fungi, animal waste, choking hazards, water hazards like ponds, water courses, and lakes, traffic dangers, stranger danger, and so on. These are just a few examples, and adults will need to do their own risk assessments and educate children about such risks. Children should also be reminded to wash their hands with soap and water after the activities.
Wherever you look, nature’s flowers and trees are bursting with life during spring and summer. This got us thinking about the many nature-based activities that are possible for children and under-5s to enjoy at this time of year — under appropriate supervision, of course. One of them is a simple leaf-hunting activity that’ll get little ones exploring the outdoors, enjoying the fresh air, having some fun, and learning about the natural world. With this in mind, we’ve put together a Leaf Scavenger Hunt reference poster for children and families. It can serve as inspiration for some common leaves to look out for during the warmer months of the year. The poster is free to download, right here today, and highlights 16 different types of leaves. Included are oak, sycamore, beech, lime and many more. Children will probably be familiar with some — especially oak leaves with their wonderful little acorns — while others may be unfamiliar. However, all of our examples were sourced on a single morning’s outing, so it’s feasible to find all 16 kinds with a bit of eagle-eyed persistence! So, download the poster for your children, print it out, and explore the outdoors to see how many of the 16 leaf types your little one can find. See if they can identify the differences which make each species of leaf/tree/plant unique — and learn their names if they can. The free identification poster and some help from an adult should help. Have fun out there!
Some of the leaves will be easier to identify than others. For example, Horse Chestnut (a.k.a. ‘conker tree’) leaves are quite distinctive with their fan of multiple sections (see the 2nd row, last image on the right on the poster for our example). In contrast, hazel and lime leaves are quite similar to one another. One easy clue to tell them apart is that lime leaves are slightly shiny, whereas hazel leaves are extremely matt. And, of course, they have very different seeds once those appear (the lime seed clusters are quite beautiful as you can see on the poster in the 3rd row, 2nd image from the right).
Another interesting factor to point out to children is that some of the leaves come in different colours. Beech leaves, for instance, can be green or deep burgundy, brown or dark purple depending on which variety of beech a child locates. It’s similar for acers, which can be green, yellow, red or a deep purple/maroon. Acers however, are more likely to be found in gardens and parks than in the countryside. Some are a little like miniature sycamores, only rather more delicate and fancy! And, come 
This activity is a great opportunity for children to open their eyes to the natural world. By looking at nature more deeply, they’ll see the finer details that may have been overlooked. Nature is incredibly varied and interesting when you take the time to look closely and discover it properly. It’ll teach children about the natural world, the seasons, the changes in plants and trees at different times of the year, the circle of life, and so much more. Getting out, close to nature, is also incredibly beneficial to children. From busting stress, improving well-being, supporting the EYFS and boosting exercise, to improving concentration and even academic grades, 
With World Bee Day arriving on the 20th of May and National Children’s Gardening Week arriving on the 24th, it’s an excellent time for a flower-growing activity for children — including under-fives. More specifically, the growing of bee-friendly flowers — from seeds — will be an excellent way to celebrate World Bee Day and support these adorable little creatures. Bees, butterflies, and other pollinators are incredibly important for the world, being largely responsible for pollinating the crops, including nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables, that we rely on for food. Yet they are under threat with numbers dwindling severely in recent years. Without bees and other pollinators, the world’s animals, plants, trees, and flowers would be in real danger. Today’s bee-friendly flower-growing activity is therefore an incredibly worthwhile one for children to get involved in. It’s fun, highly educational for little ones, and will help to make the world a better place! Little ones, let’s get growing!
Unless seeds are available from friends and family or harvests from previous years, parents of under-fives will need to source them. However, that’s easy and can be incredibly inexpensive. Most supermarkets sell seed packets and, if not, there is a whole range of online stores to choose from (
If children are going with our recommended second option, they will first need to read packets to ensure their timing is right. For seed trays, they can use inexpensive, commercially available seed trays or use smaller options like flower pots. Another free alternative is to use repurposed margarine tubs, yoghurt pots, or similar. Whichever option they choose will need drainage holes added underneath by supervising parents plus a drip tray of some kind. Whether that’s a commercial one or something as simple as a saucer is up to families.
Once the soil is layered into the seed trays or pots, to a level an inch or so below the top, children can indent the soil/compost for the seeds to go into. Seeds can be manually spaced out into these indents so that, once they grow, the individual plants will be easily separated. We suggest scattering a shallow layer of sieved soil or compost over the seeds once placed into the indents and given a sprinkling of water.
Children should continue to water the seedlings regularly, when needed, and may also have to thin out any ‘clumps’ or plants that are too close together, otherwise, several plants may get tangled and have to compete with one another unnecessarily.
Once flowers appear, children can expect pollinators like honey bees, bumblebees, butterflies, and hoverflies to appear. It’s going to be magical for children when that day first arrives! Bees and the other pollinators truly are delightful and adorable. Children should look but not touch*, after all, bees have important work to do!
This activity will raise awareness of bees and pollinators in children of all ages. It’s not only a wonderful way to introduce children to these adorable creatures, but also a great opportunity to raise awareness of the plight bees and pollinators are facing. They are under severe pressure from habitat loss, global warming, the use of harmful pesticides/weedkillers, pollution, invasive predators, and many other threats that have made their populations plummet in recent years.
World Book Day is a special charitable event, celebrated globally, that encourages children of all ages to discover the joy of reading. Why? Because reading has the power to substantially improve children’s lives. Schools, nurseries, and libraries across the nation make the day extra special for children through storytelling sessions, fancy dress, and book-related activities.
Find time for your little one to read.
Dress up as a favourite character! There’s no need for elaborate costumes; a simple hat, crown, or themed outfit inspired by a beloved book character can bring your child’s favourite stories to life.
The transition from preschool to Reception marks a significant milestone in any child’s life. It can be emotional for parents and, for children, it can be a period filled with excitement, curiosity, and perhaps a bit of apprehension. Ensuring a smooth transition involves a combination of careful planning, practical strategies and emotional support. With that in mind, today’s guide outlines more than twenty simple, actionable ways to ensure your child has a seamless transition and a positive start to school life.
Use positive reinforcement to create a positive association with the idea of school. For example, highlight the exciting aspects of learning, making friends, playing new games, and discovering new things.
Organise play dates with future classmates to build social connections before the first day. Encourage interactions with other children to develop essential social skills. Attending a nursery, preschool, or playgroup will provide excellent opportunities for this.
Foster self-reliance by allowing your child to perform simple tasks like dressing themselves, tidying up, using the toilet, and organising themselves. Also, assign small responsibilities to them at home to instil a sense of accountability and responsibility. Such skills will serve them well once at school.
Read age-appropriate books together, particularly those that introduce topics they’ll be introduced to in Reception class. This not only sparks excitement and teaches them new things but also helps children understand what to expect. Instil a love for reading through interactive reading sessions. Visit the library too and explore a variety of books.
Ensure that your child understands basic time concepts, such as morning, afternoon, and evening. This, in tandem with our next tip below, will help your child better understand the structure of the school day.
Ensure your child can manage basic self-care tasks independently. Such skills will be invaluable to them once they have started school.
Ensure sufficient sleep by establishing a calming bedtime routine. This not only gets them used to a pattern but will also help them to maintain focus and energy levels once at school.
The journey from preschool to the first day of school is a significant milestone for both parent and child. Preparing children for school involves a holistic approach that addresses emotional, social, and practical aspects. By incorporating these strategies into your family’s daily routine, you can contribute to a positive and confident transition for your child and set the stage for the most successful start to their school journey.
In the journey of childhood development, there is a simple yet powerful tool that supercharges learning, imagination and even life outcomes: reading with your child. While a magical connection with books is a cherished tradition in many families, it is also a proven way to optimise a child’s cognitive and emotional development — and even to give some a social boost. With that in mind, we explore today the incredible benefits of reading with children in the early years and learn how study after study has proven how transformational it is to their lives.
One of the most notable benefits of early reading is the rapid expansion of a child’s vocabulary. Indeed, research suggests that children who are exposed to a diverse range of words in books tend to perform better in language assessments, spelling, and overall literacy development. With reading to children opening up whole new worlds of information and vocabulary to them, this positive outcome makes total sense.
Reading with children also contributes to the development of enhanced empathy and emotional intelligence. Stories often feature characters experiencing a variety of emotions, and by engaging with these stories, children learn to empathise and connect with the feelings of others. That’s because exposure to complex characters and their emotional experiences in books helps children better understand and relate to the emotions of people in their real lives.
Reading is not just about the words on the page; it’s also about the quality time you spend together. The connection you build during reading sessions is priceless, fostering stronger bonds between you and your child.
Autumn’s arrival means that Halloween is just around the corner, coming on the 31st of October each year. The run-up to that date is a great time to start preparing for some fun Halloween activities for children to take part in. Whether dressing up for Halloween-themed parties, putting carved pumpkin lanterns and spooky decorations out at night, or playing Trick or treat locally, children of all ages will find Halloween a time of unique fun! It’s also a great opportunity for children to strengthen bonds with friends and for families to start getting creative! With that in mind, here are our top picks for spooktacular Halloween activities for kids!
Dressing up in Halloween costumes is hugely popular amongst children. While purchasing costumes from stores is quick and easy, encouraging children to make their own Halloween costumes (with adult supervision) is likely to be not only cheaper but also much more fun. They’ll also be able to get creative and learn new skills in the process.
Kids will also love dressing up as spiders. All they need is some black tights — or a pair of skinny trousers — and a black top that’s belted at the waist and then stuffed to make the ‘spider body’ fat. Extra spider legs can be made by stuffing more black tights and attaching them to the belt.
Your children can take this a step further and add Halloween-themed food into the mix, so there’s something to nibble too!
The Halloween tradition of ‘tick or treating’ has its roots in Medieval times. It is a playful remnant of the practice of “souling,” where the poor would go door-to-door during what was then known as ‘Allhallowtide’ (around All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day) asking for food in exchange for prayers for the deceased. Over the years, this evolved into what we now know as Trick or treat. Children, usually in full Halloween fancy dress, knock on neighbourhood doors and say Trick or treat? Then, homeowners typically give them sweets or other treats — or become the target of a playful trick from the children! It’s great fun for little ones, especially if one or more neighbourhood parents can organise the evening in advance. By doing so, the neighbours are warned and can opt out if they prefer. In this way, lots of fun, laughter and treats will ensue and nobody gets a trick that they weren’t expecting!
Many towns and villages will have ‘pumpkin patches’ during October. These are typically found on local farms and similar that set a field aside, chock-full of pumpkins. Families can come along and children will be able to scour the field and pick their favourite pumpkin. They can take it home in exchange, usually, for an affordable fee. Such pumpkin patches often also have wonderful photo opportunities where children can pose amongst pumpkin displays. In this way, children enjoy a morning or afternoon activity at the farm and end up with a hand-picked pumpkin too.
Hollowing out and carving spooky and creative faces into pumpkins is a classic Halloween activity enjoyed by thousands of families each year. For safety purposes, supervising adults will need to do any carving, though, as it’ll likely involve the use of a sharp knife. They can also loosen the seeds and flesh and then, if able, children can help to scoop it out. Once hollowed out and eyes, nose and mouth have been carved, children can have great fun decorating the outside and turning the pumpkin into a lantern using tea lights (again, under adult supervision or using LED lights for safety purposes). Nothing quite says ‘Halloween’ like a pumpkin face that glows in the garden at night. Children will naturally love the whole experience, end result, and feeling of accomplishment associated with this activity.
Families can combine all or just some of these Halloween activities into one event by hosting their very own Halloween party for friends, relatives and neighbours. With spooky fancy dress costumes, Halloween-themed decorations, flickering pumpkin lanterns, and themed food and drinks, it’s sure to be huge fun and a spooktacular evening for everyone! Ghostly music and ghoulish games can be added to the event too, perhaps along with a period where children and adults can tell spooky stories and ghost tales. What’s not to love?
