A favorite fall activity for kids of all ages-who doesn't love collecting leaves? Spend some time enjoying the cooler weather and collecting leaves to press.
It's just the right time of year for this project! Put on your sweater, grab a plastic tub or a gallon size plastic bag for storing specimens and go leafing.(A small piece of damp paper towel will help keep your leaves nice for several days.)
Find fall leaves of as many varieties as you can, all shapes and sizes. Remember pine and fir needles are leaves too and also that some leaves are compound, meaning they consist of a number of leaflets on a stem.
Look for heart-shaped leaves of redbud, catalpa, the poplars (cottonwood and aspens) and hackberry. Watch for pointed leaves like pecan, willow, and pine. Find ovals like apple, beech, osage orange, and hornbeam and pointy and star shapes like sweetgum, oak, sycamore, some oaks and maples.
Gather some lobed leaves like white oak and mulberry. Then add some compound leaves like box elder, ash, locusts, walnut and sumac. Some of the most fancy leaves are ginko, paulownia, tulip and mulberry.
While you are out collecting, watch for a big tree and try measuring a Champion tree.
Once you have gathered a nice variety of leaves from your area, you are ready to make a press. Mount three or four leaves of each piece of heavy paper with tape. Label each leaf clearly using a tree guide book from the library.
Layer the pages separately between several sheets of newspaper- one page- then some sheets of newspaper, a second page, more newspaper and so on. Weight the pile down with a stack of heavy books or a board under a couple of bricks. Leave them to dry for about three weeks.
Design a book cover of colored paper, laminated to make it last. The pages then can be taken out of the press and stapled together with the cover into a wonderful book.
Spare pressed leaves can be stored in a decorated shoe box labeled specimens. Try some art projects using leaves.
If you can't get outside, you can still make a leaf collection by cutting leaf pictures from magazines, drawing leaves from illustrations in a tree guide, or coloring pictures printed from this preschool coloring page site. Make these into books by stapling pages together with a colorful cover or by placing the pages into sleeve type page protecters and fitting those into a three-ring binder.
