Art with children: Bark rubbings

 We love being outdoors and doing "art projects". When the two can be combined, we get pretty excited around here! Even though my kids are young for this, they still enjoyed it. 

All you need are a couple different kinds of trees, some paper, and crayons. That's my kind of craft...no runs to the store required!! 

We discovered that white copy paper holds up much better than construction paper. Block crayons or chunky ones without the paper work best but any will do.

Simply pick a spot on the tree that is flat enough to hold the paper against it evenly. Hold it down tightly.

Then let a child (or demonstrate for them, as I did most of the time) color vigorously and evenly back and forth. The pattern of the bark from your tree will emerge on the paper. The larger of a section you color, the more obvious the pattern will be. 

Then repeat on a couple different trees, preferably with very different bark, so that you can contrast/compare them. 

We talked about the different kinds of trees in our yard, how bark is to a tree what skin is to us, and how we can distinguish different kinds of trees from their bark and their leaves. One tree had a spot on it, pictured below, where it had oozed some sap. I told Nate that sap was like the tree's blood that flowed through them and kept them alive. This was fascinating to him and he was very concerned about the tree's "boo-boo". 

This is what my sheet of "rubbings" looked like after we did three trees. The red and top right blue were different places on the same tree.

Evelyn was much more interested in going to visit the chickens then in talking about tree bark. 

 And so we did.