Apple Crafts!

Yes, it's that time of year again. Apple craft time! I saw this apple print idea in a magazine (see picture below) and thought I'd give it a shot with the kids, so one morning we whipped out the paint, cut up two apples (one lengthwise, for that classic apple shape, and one horizontally, to get the star-print where the seeds are) and got everything all set up on our porch.

R picked out the paint colors: red, pink, purple, and blue. I made her take off her fancy dress--all that fabric was sure to get dipped into the paint at some point and I didn't want to deal with the mess it would make.

RUS got in on the action too, of course, although I failed to get pictures of him doing it. The difficulty is that when you try to get a picture of him, it means you're not at that same moment making sure he doesn't do something else you don't want him to do--like eat paint or start painting the walls of the porch. This green sheet is RUS's creation. R made quite a few prints. The one below is my favorite--she loved being able to fold the paper in half and see the mirror image appear on the other side.

And she was pleased as punch to pose afterwards with the apples!

To commemorate our first visit to the orchard, we did two apple crafts. The first was to make an apple tree and cut out some apples from red, yellow, and green construction paper. RUS helped us crumple up tissue paper and decorate the apples, but R and I did most of the work. R cut out almost all the yellow apples and I think I did the green ones. J decorated a few, too. Then R and I colored on a tree that I cut out of brown construction paper--we tried to give the bark a somewhat realistic tone!

Then R dictated the placement of the apples on the tree, as well as the placement of the tree on the window. As the season progresses, we'll add more things--like pumpkins, maybe even bats and a full moon, and of course, turkeys!

In addition to our tissue and construction paper apples, R and I made some "a is for apple" apples. We cut out letter "a"s, dug seeds out of a few of our orchard-fresh apples, cut out construction paper stems and leaves, and glued them all on. R even took one in to her pre-Kindergarten class, which is about to start a unit focusing on individual letters so her teacher was VERY interested in this particular craft. We haven't stuck these apples up on our tree yet but they'll be appearing there very soon.

I will say, in doing all these crafts lately, I've realized that RUS is not all that interested in doing crafts. It was easier working with 2-year-old R on crafty stuff because we only had her to work with. But with both of them it is really hard to monitor and help R while trying to wrangle RUS at the same time. I've been trying to come up with some crafts that he can do more easily. Like stick stickers on stuff. He loves that! And he's been having fun with crayons lately so those masterpieces may be appearing in select mailboxes before too long.

I think the other thing too is that I forget that R was a lot like this too-- you had to focus on crafts with a short attention span. She's been so interested in crafty stuff for so long that I've forgotten it ever used to be hard to get her to do them. I would plan out cards for the cousins, for example, and it'd take a week to get them done because she'd only be willing to do one card at a time! Or just one step at a time!