Winter Tree Art for Kids

Brrrrrrr! There’s even a chill of winter in the air here in Florida! This time of the year is short lived for us, but it doesn’t stop us from diving into a fun winter theme filled with lots of learning. Since we don’t get to witness snow for ourselves, much less major transformations of trees, we take the opportunity to learn about how trees change throughout the seasons. After discovering that many trees lose their leaves as temperatures shift, we extended our learning by creating some winter tree art. The best part about this art activity is getting outside and collecting your materials!

As you may have noticed if you’ve been following along with our fun and learning over the years, we take any opportunity we can get to paint without paintbrushes and use unconventional or natural materials in our art projects. For this winter tree art, we decided to once again ditch the paintbrushes and paint with q-tips instead!

Winter Tree Art for Kids

GET A FULL WEEK OF WINTER THEME ACTIVITIES IN OUR  PRESCHOOL WINTER LESSON PLANS.

Materials

• small twigs
• construction paper
• white paint
• q-tips
• glue

Related: Preschool Tree Theme Planning Guide

Getting Started

Head outside for a quick search for fallen twigs and sticks. We found lots of small sticks laying on the ground near our bushes and under trees. Kids will love going on this outdoor scavenger hunt that will soon be turned into art!

Once your twigs are collected, take a moment to examine them. Take notice of their similarities and differences. Lengths and thickness. We grabbed our hand held magnifying glass to take an even closer look. And we happened to discover some tiny bus crawling on a stick! (Don’t worry, we released them- quickly!)

Related: 45+ Tree Activities for Kids

Winter Tree Art

After the fun of collecting and examining has been had, begin by designing the layout of your wintry tree. We discussed parts of a tree prior to doing this. It helped us in selecting a thicker, bigger stick to represent the base of the tree. We used smaller, thinner twigs and placed them carefully above branching off in all directions.

Now that a design is in place, you can start gluing it down. We first poured some liquid glue onto a paper plate and dipped a q-tip in it to help place the glue. Making sure that you apply glue to the part of the twig that lays flat onto the construction paper is very important!

We discovered another method along the way, by carefully dipping the stick into the glue with the flat side down. Choose whichever method suits you best!

Allow students to repeat the steps of gluing and placing until their wintry tree is beautifully glued down. You may want to give it some time to dry prior to adding the “snow.” This helped us in avoiding any mishaps with bumping the tree branches out of place.

For the final touch on this winter tree art activity, use a q-tip to make it snow all around the tree! Grabbing the q-tip and carefully dipping and blotting it onto the paper is excellent fine motor practice for tiny hands.

It was suggested by one of our artists that we should make some snow on the ground. What a great idea! We added some mounds of “snowflakes” around the tree to make it look like it had been snowing for awhile.

We had so much fun learning about how trees change in the winter and using natural materials to create a beautiful work of art. We hope you enjoy this winter art activity as much as we did!

Print

5 from 1 vote

Winter Tree Art for Kids

After discovering that many trees lose their leaves as temperatures shift, we extended our learning by creating some winter tree art. The best part about this art activity is getting outside and collecting your materials!

Prep Time30 minutes mins

Active Time30 minutes mins

Materials

• Small Twigs
• Construction Paper Light Blue
• White Paint
• Q-Tips
• Glue

Instructions

• Head outside for a quick search for fallen twigs and sticks. We found lots of small sticks laying on the ground near our bushes and under trees.
• After collecting your twigs, begin by designing the layout of your wintry tree onto the construction paper.
• Now that a design is in place, you can start gluing it down. Making sure that you apply glue to the part of the twig that lays flat onto the construction paper is very important!
• Allow students to repeat the steps of gluing and placing until their wintry tree is beautifully glued down. You may want to give it some time to dry before the next step.
• Use a q-tip to make it snow all around the tree! Grab the q-tip, carefully dip it in your white paint, and blot it onto the paper.
• Optionally add some mounds of “snowflakes” around the tree to make it look like it has been snowing for awhile.

Notes

This is our preferred white paint, but any white paint will work.

Looking for more winter fun? Get a full week of winter theme activities with our preschool winter lesson plans!

Original post and additional photographs from Fantastic Fun and Learning can be found at https://www.fantasticfunandlearning.com/winter-tree-art-kids.html

PRINTABLE WINTER THEME LESSON PLANS

Save time and get right to the playful learning with our printable lesson plan sets. We have a variety of lesson plan sets that work well as winter themes. Each set includes over 30 playful learning activities related to the theme, and we’ve provided different versions for home preschool families and classroom teachers so all activities are geared directly toward your needs.

Watch this short video to see just a few examples of the types of activities and printables included in this set:

1) 10 Little Trees Winter Song and Number Cards (in color and b/w)
2) Get Dressed for Winter Activity Mats and Clothing (in color and b/w)
3) Hot Cocoa Counting Mats 1-20 (in color and b/w)
4) Winter Color Matching Puzzles
5) What Can We Do in Winter? Emergent Reader (4 versions)
6) Child and Snow Angel Uppercase and Lowercase Alphabet Matching (in color and b/w)
7) Winter Number Cards 0-35 (3 versions in color and b/w)
8) Winter Roll and Graph (in color and b/w)
9) Winter Tree Dice Game (in color and b/w)
10) Winter Picture-Word Cards

GET YOUR LESSON PLANS

Also available on Teachers Pay Teachers.