Love the idea of crafting with nature but not sure where to start? Try this simple and fun way to collect nature and create art with the most lovely crafting supplies around! Crafting with nature is the perfect way to connect kids with nature and helps you ditch plastic crafting supplies for natural and biodegradable material. Give it a try today!
Here is a word of caution before you get started! When collecting pieces of nature, try to identify as many as possible and make sure you aren’t collecting anything poisonous or that could cause an allergic reaction.
Ok, now on to the fun stuff! These activities are super easy because you can just print them and go! You don’t need to freehand any pictures or search for clip art online. Just print and head outside with your kids!
And guess what?? There are activities for all year round! There are specific labels all four seasons and different types of nature collections.
Ready to get started? Here’s what you’ll need
Supplies:
- Pieces of nature
- Egg carton
- Tape/glue
- Scissors
- Printer paper
- My Wind Finds
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RELATED: Check out How to Make Flower Rocks
Let’s Start With Collecting Nature:
We love using egg cartons to collect nature finds! The separate compartments are perfect for collecting, sorting, and displaying your nature finds! If you are worried about salmonella, then I suggest getting a plastic egg carton so you can wash it.
Here’s a little more about the printables for the egg cartons:
These labels are a fun way to personalize and decorate your egg cartons! There are 7 different egg carton collection prompts: summer, fall, winter, spring, flowers, rocks, and one for general use. These can be used as a scavenger hunt or inspiration for items to collect during the nature walk. There is also a cover that says, “My Wild Finds” that goes on the top of the egg carton. These come in color and black/white. The black and white are great for coloring.
Here are a few photos of different labels. This is the top cover for the egg carton:
Here is the summer version. Bring your scissors outside and invite your little ones to strengthen their fine motor skills by cutting pieces of nature and putting them in the egg carton. There is so much variety in nature during the summer! We might need to try a larger egg carton this year.
Here is the fall version. You might notice the little holes in the egg carton compartments. My boys enjoyed poking the leaf stems through the holes and this made it much easier to display the leaves.
Here is the rock version. This might be my boys’ favorite collection because the compartments are perfect for organizing the rocks:)
You can see the rest of the labels in the preview in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
Once the items are collected, you can keep the collection together or decide to use pieces of it to create beautiful nature crowns, masks, and pictures!
Let’s check Out the Nature Crowns and Masks:
It’s so fun to see how the crafts change through out the seasons. The crowns and masks look completely different from summer to fall due the the pieces of nature available to us. Check out this colorful and beautiful nature crown from the summer the ferns and flowers make this crown look so regal!
My son’s favorite color is green, so he loved the ferns. Next we made a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle” mask.
I love the fall crown too! We had a bunch of gorgeous Japanese Maple leaves that just fell from the tree so we put them to good use and glued them to the crown.
You can see the rest of the crown and mask designs here in the preview in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
I Love How This Beautiful Nature Picture Turned Out!
I also included a wide variety of pictures to decorate with nature!
These sheets can be used as loose parts mats or crafting pages. You can cut or rip flower petals and leaves into smaller pieces to make them fit better! If you are using them as loose mats mats, then you don’t need glue and kids can move and manipulate the pieces of nature in any way they choose. You can also print the pages on cardstock and laminate for loose parts mats to help them last longer.
If you would like to craft, then grab glue so the pieces of nature stick to the page. Read the prompts together at the top of the page and get busy creating! These pages come in color and black/white.
The butterfly photo is perfect for spring and summer! Look at how pretty it turned out.
You can see the entire packet in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
Pin it and save it for later!
I hope you give this simple nature activity a try! I promise, your little nature lovers will love it as much as my boys.
∼Tara
