For a Charlotte Mason type activity, we decided to create our own fall wreath from organic materials found on a nature walk in our neighborhood. Armed with buckets, Emily and Camille spent an hour riding bikes and scooters up and down the sidewalk, buckets banging their legs, looking for beautiful leaves to use on our wreath. They also collected crabapples from the ground next to a crabapple tree and cool pieces of bark.

Today, we cut a circle from a big piece of cardboard(a GREAT way to incorporate Math and show its value to Art: we decided what diameter we wanted the wreath to be, divided that by two(to be the radius of the circle), measured a piece of yarn that size and tied it to a pencil. The other end of yarn was attached to the center of the piece of cardboard. We learned that the diameter of a circle is twice the radius.

After cutting the cardboard piece out and cutting an appropriate sized hole in the center, we used a hot glue gun(well, I used the hot glue gun) and attached a layer of leaves to the cardboard. Then we used the other things we found(berries/bark/etc) to add dimension.

Husband was unsure about the “plan” before we did it and was pleasantly surprised at how nicely it turned out.

Not bad for a free art project! Learning points we touched upon included:

• Deciduous and Coniferous Trees
• Geometry–radius/diameter/circumference of a circle
• multi-media art–creating dimension and texture