Colourful Fall Birch Trees Art Project

This is a simple art project that can be done in any primary classroom. I did it in Kindergarten (in small groups) but you can absolutely do it in higher grades as well!

When I taught K, I mostly did art in small groups because it made it so much easier to manage. Since this project takes a few steps, it would be easy to quickly pull small groups and have them complete the task. Since I’ve taught 2/3 I do art as full group but you can definitely do small groups too if that’s the way you like to manage your art time.

Time required: 2 blocks

The first is quick, only 5-10 minutes max to do the background.

The second will take more time, 30-40 minutes, depending on age.

Materials:

• White paper (card stock or heavier weight does best with paint but you can use regular printer weight as well)

• Tempera pucks/paint palette (green, blue)

• Acrylic paint or liquid tempera paint (red, orange, yellow)

• Paint brushes (large for background, smaller for leaves)

• Newspaper

• Sharpie

• Glue stick

Teacher prep:

I cut apart the newspaper to get rid of any images as we only want the black and white text parts. I allow my students to cut their own trees, so just cut it in chunks that they could then cut apart.

Procedure:

Day 1 (background)

• Using the tempera pucks, paint a hill in green and then a sky in blue. If they wanted to add a sun, go for it.

• Leave to dry.

• Once dry, they’ll likely be curled on the edges. Weigh them down under some heavy books so that it’s flat when you go to do step 2.

Day 2 (trees)

• Using the newspaper, cut strips that are tree trunk shaped. You can have 2-4 trees of varying thickness and height.

• Glue the newspaper trunk to your background.

• Outline the tree with a Sharpie. If you have older students, you could allow them to add some marks like on actual birch trees.

• Create leaves in red, orange and yellow paint with your paintbrush. I tell my students to start with red, then orange, then yellow so that the colours don’t get too muddled.

  • Alternatively you could have students do this with their fingers.

  • Some students do not like the feeling of paint on their fingers, in which case a paintbrush or Q-tip would be a fine alternative.

• Some students could also opt to add leaves falling and/or leaves on the ground.