we’ve been celebrating the changing of seasons with an exploration of color all week.

on the first day of autumn, we “tie dyed” big coffee filters cut into leaf shapes.

my washable liquid watercolor hasn’t arrived yet (?!?!?!?!?), so i opened several of these and diluted them with water.  they worked great (though now we don’t have our red, yellow or orange dot markers)…

the first day we did this project, each child worked on their own leaf.  the next day we had the individual leaves balled and twisted on the table for the children to paint until all were colored.  i did this at first because i anticipated some younger ones having a hard time stopping when their leaf was saturated.

this really simplified the project.  there was less teacher work in name writing (because we did it ahead of time).  there was a relaxed tone of working together to hide all the white.   i liked that the focus was on pulling paint into the dropper and then squeezing it out.

we hung a string between a couple poles to let them dry (with the help of a fan).

these are delightfully colorful.  especially when in a window or fluttering in a row.