Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Tree Age Ring Art
Our theme this month is EcoVenture from Experience Early Learning. We’re exploring wonders of the trees, air, water, and dirt. Great summer explorations ahead! Check out our Build a Bird Nest Activity, Nature Letters and Y is for Yellow Dandelion Play Dough. Usually, our creative art is an individual activity, but I like to incorporate group art activities from time to time. Learn about the rings a tree trunk makes as it grows through process art with this Tree Age Ring Art Invitation to Create.
Tree Age Ring Art
Isn’t it amazing we can determine how old a tree is by how many rings it has inside its trunk? We looked at our tree to guess how many years old it is but we couldn’t count the rings in the trunk because it’s still growing, I know when we planted it so it was fun to hear the guesses!
This is one of my favorite styles of creative art – Invitation to Create, which are process art activities. Experience Early Learning sends beautiful Inspiration Photos for us to look at and then be inspired to create.
Any time we can take art or other learning activities outside we do! I put together our two picnic tables and covered them with roll craft paper. I set out cups and containers for the kids to dip into paper plates of brown paint.
I also provided brown crayons, glue, and brown twine. We looked at the tree ring Inspiration Photo and thought about how we could make tree rings with the materials provided.
Everyone got busy creating their tree age ring art. It looked different for each one. The two-year-olds at the right end of the table made lots of circle prints with the cups. Then they discovered the glue bottles!
The older ones made concentric circles with multiple materials and experimented with the different-sized cups.
We noticed that some of the cups made thicker rings than others. The Inspiration Photo showed various thicknesses of rings too. So we wondered why that would be. Maybe the tree grew more one year than another? That makes sense because sometimes we grow more at certain times of our lives too.
I so enjoy watching my group working all at the same time, talking, and sharing materials. It’s a good exercise to practice social skills and cause them to be aware of each other’s space at the table.
I wasn’t expecting this detail they came up with – the kids named their trees. The school-age came up with this idea and I love it. First, we have “Oldy”, “Bold the Tree” and then “Hakuna Matata”, because that child was wearing that on his shirt. Cute idea! She wrote the names for everyone. Kids learn so much from each other and come up with ideas I wouldn’t have.
More Tree Activities
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