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Acorn Crafts for Kids

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It seems like the squirrels are already getting all the acorns where I live, but if you can save some from them (not too many; they’ve got to eat, too!) you can make some fun acorn crafts. Whether you do this at home or in a classroom, it’s a fun way to hang onto fall and make something pretty with natural materials.

I’ve never really done anything special with my acorns when we bring them inside, but if you want to make yours last for years, check out the tips at Staying Close to Home. If you want to just paint your acorns and leave it at that, this tutorial from Home Stories A to Z can help you there.

Of course an acorn, painted or not, is an obvious surface for a face (like on these acorn necklaces we shared a few years ago; the original site seems to be gone but I’ll bet you can get the idea from the photo of how to make your own).

And from adding a face it’s only a short journey to turning acorns into squirrels, like this adorable project from Toys in the Dryer. Or you can make acorn mice like these from Kids Craft Room. Use a pipe cleaner if you don’t have fuzzy yarn for the tail.

Or grab the googly eyes and some other materials and make a fun character with acorns, like these from Raising a Blessing. So cute!

Add a marble to an acorn cap to make a pretty necklace with instructions from Rhythms of Play. You could also just paint the caps separately and use them in projects, as hats for peg dolls or in other ways your kids are sure to come up with on their own.

You can also turn acorns into adorable toadstool mushrooms. Learn how from Twig and Toadstool.

How do you play and craft with acorns? I’d love to hear your ideas!

Acorn Learning Activities

Make Pretty Acorn Necklaces with Marbles

Using Natural Objects in the Fall Classroom

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Sun Activities for Kids

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked. 

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.