Fall art project for kids: Leaf collages

A fun project for fall is to go to a park or other place with lots of trees and collect fall leaves. But then, what to do with the leaves? How about making leaf collages?

Inspired by two books, we set out to make a colorful collection of characters using fall leaves as our main material. See how they turned out!

Note: For more leaf activities, see my Botany Unit Study page.

Our inspiration for this activity came from reading two different books (both of which are reviewed in my post on children’s books about leaves):

The first was Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert. This book has a simple story told mainly with pictures created from leaves.

The second book was Look What I Did with a Leaf! by Morteza E. Sohi. This book features some AMAZING leaf collages! Older kids will be seriously inspired by this book.

After reading these books, we decided to try our hand at making our own leaf collages.

We spent some time in our neighborhood and at a local park collecting a wide variety of fall leaves. We selected leaves of many different colors, sizes, and shapes.

To add a bit of fun to our leaf collages, I set out some adornments to use along with our leaves, including sequins, wiggle eyes, pom poms, and buttons.

We each selected a colored piece of poster board for creating our leaf collages. And then we set to work, allowing the shapes, colors, and sizes of the leafs to inspire our creations. And once we had the right design, we glued it down to preserve.