Leaf Journal

This is a wonderful time of year to hike around and collect fallen leaves from the trees. It is a great opportunity to meet the trees in your area or get to know them more. We have made a little book of rubbings from some of the leaves around us. We gathered a lot of Maple, Beech, and some Cottonwood, Black Cherry, Dogwood, and fruit trees that we planted just this year.

First, we made the cover by painting the negative space of a leaf or leaves of choice. Then, we sewed in some pages of thin paper. After we collected our leaves and knew who they were from we rubbed their print into our book and labeled them. This is also a nice handwriting practice activity for little ones. Block crayons work especially well to make the rubbings with, but you could also use a crayon turned on its side.This technique is known as Frottage, a surrealist method of transferring textural information from objects to paper. Happy collecting!