Unplug Your Kids: Trees

This week's Unplugged theme is trees. This has been, by far, the easiest theme so far. I had a ton of ideas come to mind. I thought about bringing Arin to work with me to tour a tree farm - but really, what two year old is going to care about 400 acres of trees? I thought about making her a tree matching flip book. I thought about taking pictures of her in a tree (but it's been too rainy this week for that). I thought about gluing shapes to leaves and letting Arin play a matching game with those. I also thought about making a tree puzzle. But in the end, I didn't go with any of those ideas!

One of Arin's favorite activities is to paint. First, I let her color on the front side and the back side of a magnolia leaf. She liked painting the underside of the leaf the best. I was going to have her paint other big leaves also (sycamore, maple, loquat), but we never got around to that.

On Sunday morning, we went went out, before it rained, and gathered some leaves - some green & some brown. I drew a tree trunk, scanned it, and printed out four copies. Then, we glued the leaves to the trunk to represent the different seasons.

Spring (Only a few, small, green leaves)

Summer (lots of green leaves)
Fall (leaves changing color and starting to fall off tree)

Winter (leaves have turned brown and all fallen off the tree, except the one that Arin insisted still belonged on the tree)

Sunday evening, we went on a picnic and ate under a big oak tree!

Next, we made a tree t-shirt. We used a white t-shirt that Arin already had. I used brown fabric paint and painted Arin's arm and hand (tree trunk). Then, we used green fabric paint, which Arin dipped her thumb in and then pressed her thumb on the shirt to make leaves.

For the last tree activity, I made a family tree matching game. This game has been the most time consuming and the most expensive game that I have made, but I also think it is one of the most fun Arin has played. My plans were to print a black & white copy of each picture to glue to the poster board and then a color picture for Arin to use as matching. However, Wal-Mart's digital photo machine wasn't too user friendly and there was nobody around to help me. So I didn't know how to make a black and white and a color picture of each photo without making two separate orders, which I didn't want to do. So I made them all color, which is fine. The biggest mistake I made was "borrowing" pictures from people's myspace accounts. They looked fine on my computer, but when I went to print them out, some of them were completely unrecognizable. Some worked ok, but I wish I would have taken the time just to look through my pictures and found some of everyone. So, I will have to wait until this weekend and take some more pictures of the missing family members and complete the game then. For the "matching" cards, I laminated those (using contact paper). After I put everyone's picture on the board, I will cover the posterboard with contact paper, so that there won't be fingerprints ruining the pictures. Arin is like her mommy and she loves pictures! She was very excited about this game. She would say most everyone's name as she matched them. Some people she doesn't know as well, so she had to ask who they were. I think that's great too because she is getting to learn her family members and maybe she won't be as shy the next time she sees the people she isn't as familiar with.