The I Love My Family Tree: A Nursery Art Project

I serve in the Nursery at Church; we (myself and another wonderful friend) play with, watch over, sing, have snacks, teach very short lessons and do some fun art projects with children 18 months old up to 3 years old.  I have found some fun things on pinterest and usually end up adapting the projects since these children are so young.



This month was "love" month; we have and have one more week to do lessons about love: Jesus and Heavenly Father love me, Showing love, I Love my Family and I love myself.

      
   This is the original pin with location; I loved this but I knew I'd have to adapt this to young children.

 

http://scrumdillydo.blogspot.com/2011/01/pretty-valentine-trees.html

Since we were talking about loving our families, we thought it would be good to get the names of the children's family members to add to the heart tree.

I cut out many, many heart shapes (freehand) from red and pink envelopes.  I though the weight of an envelope would look more airy on a tree than construction paper.  I figured it would take about 25 - 30 hearts per tree, but the kids didn't use that many after all; guess it's better to be safe than sorry.

I didn't have a fun brown marker at home and I started the project on Saturday evening after I had already gotten ready for bed so I wasn't running to the store!  For the trunk and limbs I used the last part of a brown paint pen that I had, the last of a brown marker and then a brown crayon on the last few.

I spread the purple colored glue sticks on the paper where the hearts would go (I used purple so the kids could see the glue), and tried to get them to do it themselves.  The younger children needed quite a bit of help, but the 2 year olds did fairly well.  

This was the one I did beforehand so the kids could see.

I loved the way these turned out; in fact, I think it might be fun to try one with a nice paint pen or paint and more country-type colors that I could actually frame and hang in my home.