Straw Blown Family Tree Activity for Preschoolers

Welcome to Animal Adventure week of the Virtual Book Club – today we’re sharing a craft activity to go with the book One Gorilla: A counting book by Anthony Browne. With beautiful illustrations of some of our favourite primates, it’s a fantastic Animal Book for counting with toddlers and preschoolers. Using that book for inspiration as we are all one family belonging the primates we are extending the book to create a family tree

The family theme is one of the most popular themes for preschool and I found to be one of the best to introduce early in the year. This creative activity is a fun activity that you can do with children to learn a little more about them and their family.

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Related Activity – Family Theme Activities for Preschoolers

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What you need to Create a Family Tree

Straw

Ready Mixed Paint

Water

Paper

Green Paper

Glue

Pictures of family members or pen

How to Create a Family Tree

To create our tree I thought it would be a lot of fun to use a straw to blow the paint into a tree form with J and T. Using ready-mixed paint I watered it down and the kids helped mixed it up – it needs to be a runny consitency to be able to be blown by the straw.

Then we placed some paint at the bottom of the paper in a puddle and using the straw blew it up into a tree like shape – at first T tried to suck but we quickly perfected the blowing technique and by turning the paper around for her we created a tree and then put it aside to dry.

As my printer has yet to be set up (yes I am a tech geek and my husband works in computers but we haven’t got the printer working yet!) we couldn’t go with my original plan to use pictures of family members for the family tree instead we had to write the names of people.

I cut out with J’s help some leaf shapes to write the names of and then we talked about our family and who makes up the family. With T’s help and J’s we wrote the names of people in the family on the leaves. Then J and T stuck them onto the tree their names and our dog at the bottom workng up to grandparents at the top.

This week Toddler Approved has shared an activity to go with The Little Mouse, the red ripe strawberry and the big hungry bear and The Educators’ Spin On It has shared an activity to go with Mouse Count. This is the last week of the Virtual Book Club Summer Camp and I hope you have enjoyed our activities.