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Faces in Nature: An Art Activity from Your Own Backyard

Well, as with most things that have happened this month, this is not the post I had planned to write. Like all of us, it’s now about quarantine survival mode for our kids and our families. Patience is wearing thin, among other things. Some days are good, and some days are bad. Really bad. So, here we are. We are all doing what we can. I thought I’d share a fun little art and nature activity that we started our day with today. We created faces using things we found in nature. I can’t take credit for creating the idea as my friend Nicky shared it with me after having her kids do it, but I did make the printable face PDF (in both light and dark skin tones), which you can download for free!

Faces in Nature

First, we started our homeschooling morning with a nature walk through our neighborhood. We gathered all kinds of things from nature to make our faces.

Morning Nature Walk

After a thirty minute trek around the neighborhood, we finally collected enough items. Each child had his/her own bag for collecting.

Each child had a bag for collecting nature items!

Some of our favorite items we collected were: snail shells, flowers, tiny pine cones, red berries, pine needles, pebbles and even a few bugs (eek!). After we got back from our walk, we laid out all our nature items onto baking sheets with a layer of paper towels underneath. This helped to absorb any wetness from the items as we had done our walk in the morning and many items were still damp with dew.

put all of your nature items on a paper towel in case they are wet or damp.

I pre-printed the empty face pages on heavy duty white card stock. Then, the kids got work making many different faces with their nature items!

Print out empty faces on heavy duty white card stock.

Many of their faces included flower crown headbands! I also loved the small daisy earrings and red berry mouth.

The possibilities are endless!

One of the best parts about this art activity is that you can clear off your face and start over again!

Green grass makes for some great hair!

Funny faces were our favorite—the sillier, the better!

We loved making funny faces!

This guy is even wearing sunglasses!

My daughter made this guy have some sunglasses!

This guy has a pretty amazing bark beard.

The guy has a pretty great bark beard!

This girl is a flower child!

Love the use of flowers in the hair!

Hopefully you can recreate this activity at home with your kids. It’s fun to get out on a walk as well (away from others, of course) and make this activity into phys. ed. and art combined into one class.