Puzzle trees

We pulled out the paints for the first time this term to try a seasonal project that I found on Gail Bartel's wonderful blog - thatartistwoman.org

If you've never visited her blog I highly recommend it!! She has amazing ideas and gives step by step instructions for all her wonderful projects so when I saw these cute puzzle trees I knew I wanted to try them with my kiddies.

They turned out beautifully - and we got most of the project finished in one afternoon.

We started by painting our backgrounds and while they were drying we painted puzzle pieces in fall colors.

I totally forgot to take photos until they were finished with the puzzle pieces so you can't see the different stages properly here - but Gail has it all step by step at the link above so definitely visit. (Plus her trees DO look more professional than ours :) )

Once the puzzle pieces were finished and drying we returned to the backgrounds to paint the bare trees. I think my kiddies did a really good job with these!!

And then we let everything dry overnight and glued on the puzzle leaves in the morning. I've mounted four, ready for the bulletin board and will finish the rest of them tomorrow. Then we're going to create some fall-themed word problems on giant puzzle pieces and scatter them among the art work for a fun display. (And it will give my girls some practice in creating word problems - I think we'll stick to addition and subtraction for now :) )

What do you think of our trees so far? Pretty nice, huh? :)

We don't have much of an autumn here - no real seasonal changes at all - so we have to create our own autumnal displays. This was our beginning!