Put all four seasons on one very special tree! This is an adorable piece of take-home art that explores seasonal changes.
Winter, spring, summer, fall! Each season brings changes to the world around us, and one of the best ways to see these changes is to look at the trees and plants outside. Using tempera paint and Roylco’s R55004 Super Value Leaves Sponges, your students can create an artistic representation of the changes foliage experiences over the year!
The sponges are cut from a thick blue sponge with bubbles in the material to add texture to your prints. Dip the sponge into a bowl of thick tempera paint or fingerpaint! Make sure you keep the sponge flat down against the paint so that it completely covers the bottom surface of the sponge. Bristol paper, poster board or fingerpaint paper are great mediums for stamping the various shapes as they will absorb the paint without warping too much. Encourage your students to stamp repeatedly on the same sheet of paper.
Leaves are actually an organ! You have a heart, brain, liver and lungs, but trees have leaves. Leaves help plants to eat and breathe by performing photosynthesis, a process that converts carbon dioxide, water and sunlight into food for the plant. This also helps US to breathe, because when plants make their own food, they produce oxygen. One important component of photosynthesis is chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is what gives leaves their green color. When the chlorophyll in a plant breaks down, the leaf changes color! That’s why in the fall, leaves turn yellow, orange and red before falling off the tree completely.
Don’t worry about trees being hungry in the winter! Once their leaves fall off and winter comes, trees enter what is called a dormant phase. To put it simply, trees go to sleep in the winter. Usually trees lose all their leaves before it starts to snow, but sometimes it gets cold enough at night to form hoarfrost. This is the delicate covering of ice crystals you sometimes see on leaves in the fall. In northern climates, especially in places like Alaska, winter comes so fast that the leaves are frozen to the tree! This beautiful image is what we wanted to represent with the blue winter leaves.
When things start to warm up in the spring, trees wake up and grow new leaves to start the whole process over again!
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