Half-term fun with leaves

Seven autumn leaf activities for you and the children over half term:
Whatever the weather, once you're out there, it'll freshen you all up - or the kids anyway! But seriously, you'll be glad to be out of the house and breathing that fresh air, even if you are swallowing the odd rain drop too. So, here we go:

1) Go leaf-hunting. Set challenges to find a certain colour or shape, or one with a caterpillar hole in, or two joined together. Send spare ones whirling in the wind. Try throwing them to each other - impossible?

2) Play Pooh Sticks, or rather Pooh Leaves, on a river bridge, each dropping a leaf down, or preferably a twig of leaves - easier to follow - and see whose is first to come out the other side. (In my past experience, the children's usually seemed to emerge last, regrettably, so I would pretend mine was one of theirs: saved tears!)

Collect more leaves to take home with you. Back indoors, cover the kitchen table with newspaper and set up paints, wax crayons, scrap paper and card, glue and scissors.

3) Put leaves under paper and rub with wax crayons for 'brass rubbing' effect patterns.

4)  Fine art: help children to draw and paint a leaf of their own.

5) Picture poetry: draw a huge, page-sized leaf, or help them to, and write a poem together inside it. This could be a simple simile, starting: "My leaf is as red/orange/fragile/floaty/other... as a ________ .

This could then be extended underneath into a vivid, vibrant vision of that image, as here:

My leaf is as orange as a tiger's eyes -
as orange as a tiptoeing tiger's dazzling, golden-orange eyes, shining out in the midnight jungle.

Keeping the writing clear, the leaf can now be coloured in, cut out and backed onto cardboard.

All artwork can be displayed on the wall, or made into greetings cards or presents for family members.

6) Leaf people: help children to draw and cut out leaf shapes from coloured card (or paper backed with card), and draw funny faces on them. Each could have a name written on the back. Can they talk, and do they have funny voices? Will they be joining you for tea?

7)  Adventure of a fly-away leaf...: settle your children to bed with a story about an autumn leaf and its journey through the sky, letting them contribute ideas as you go along. Does it sail over the ocean? A calm, blue one or a dark, stormy one? What then? Does it skip and dance over a deep, dangerous forest, or glide over the rolling, golden sands of a desert? Or does it hit the nearest washing-line and end up in somebody's trouser pocket?

Perhaps your children would like to write out the story next day, with embellishments and illustrations. Would the family like a mimed and narrated performance of it, with gentle background percussion or music, perhaps?

Still raining outside? Get fire-work-painting, -writing and -enacting on the go!