With the arrival of Spring (although it will not be official until next Sunday), we have been finding ourselves looking upward quite a bit.  Which is never a bad place to be looking in my book.  We've been watching the birds, the morning mist, and the trees begin to leaf out.

A few Saturdays ago while I had a few minutes before the crew woke up, I was enjoying my coffee and surfing around the web.  I came across Made By Joel blog and this great slotted disk craft, by way of Blair.  I thought this was a great idea and would be so fun for the boys. 

And almost immediately afterward, I found myself on the Anthrpologie site and came across this great tree.  I think they call it a deciduous puzzle.

So last Friday night after dinner, we were having one of those nights where everyone seems to be bugging everyone (on purpose) and I was tempted to have another movie night.  But instead, I pulled out our cardstock, a Spring Country Living (British Edition) from 2008, glue and scissors and started cutting and gluing and slotting.  The boys were fascinated.  And as all of our kids artistic endeavors, they took it one step further and left me sitting back in wonder.

Not that you couldn't figure this out too, but here is what we did:

{Slotted Easter Tree}

Supplies:

• scissors
• glue
• Spring magazine
• cereal boxes

Directions:

• Pick out Spring inspired pages from the magazine and tear them out
• Cut up recycled cereal boxes and glue the pages from the magazine to the colored side of the cereal box leaving the cardboard colored side showing
• Set them aside and let them dry
• Cut out a tree shape from one of the largest pieces of cereal box (repeat, you will need 2 of them)
• Next, find the center of your tree shapes.  Using the first tree shape, cut from the bottom center half way up the tree.  Using the second tree shape, cut from the top center halfway down the tree
• These two pieces will slot into each other and allow your tree to stand up
• Your magazine glued pages should be almost dry now, so cut out around 20 small rectangles approximately 1 inch by 1/2 inch.  Cut small slots into the opposing short sides of your rectangle
• Then cut leaf shapes out of the glued magazines and cut a slot into one end of the leaf.
• Now all that is left is to add the leaves to your tree.
• (Optional)  you can cut a small slit in the the tree and slip in a cutout of a bird

---------

We didn't end us adding the little rectangle slotted pieces until later that night, so I don't have any good photos of them.  But either way it seems to work just fine.

After the magazine tree was done, Ian ran upstairs to get an old 1970's kids craft book...one of many in our collection... that had these great paper trees in it.  Using these ideas, the boys added a few other kinds of paper (slotted and otherwise) trees to our Easter forest.  

There is even a banana tree in our forrest.  This has lead to some great discussions about different kinds of trees and their different leaves.

So, make some paper trees with your kids this week!  Im so happy we did this together.

--------

For more paper tree inspiration:

Patricia's great little recycled paper tree

Jenifer's christmas trees could be adapted for Spring using pastel papers