Fall in Sammamish can be pretty beautiful. We have been admiring the beautiful fall leaves for the past couple of weeks. Kids have been asking questions about the leaves, commenting on the amazing colors, and every day they have been looking for the smallest and largest leaves from our huge maple tree behind the preschool.

Naturally, we have been bringing them into our classroom, studying them, painting them, printing with them, crumbling them, cutting them… trying to learn as much as we can about them.

I just wanted to share two of my favorite art projects that we did. The first one was a large-scale watercolor & tempera painting inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘Lake George.’ The kids loved the process. We talked about painting our sky and our lake with watercolors and then adding the trees, mountains and beautiful fall leaves – but the project was guided only lightly. Kids used the same colors but as you can see, each of them did it very differently.

The second one was our first Styrofoam printing of fall leaves – in two colors. Kids LOVED the process and really enjoyed poking, pushing and drawing into the Styrofoam… as well as spreading the printing ink and using the rubber rollers. It was a wonderful small project that all the parents admired and kids enjoyed 🙂

Now we are moving onto apples and pumpkins. Yay!