For the last two weeks we’ve been on our term break. And although that’s meant we’ve had no compulsory work set by school it hasn’t meant we’ve stopped home school completely.
Quite the opposite really, with outdoor restrictions in place and everywhere closed we’ve really been thinking up ways to occupy the kids without resorting to them watching the tv for long periods of the day.
Whilst they’ve had days where they’ve taken themselves off playing imaginary days, we’ve also had days which have included more directed activities such as our Harry Potter day.
And making our family tree. Quite literally a tree using real leaves – it’s about a metre tall and now on display in our living room.
Living in Qatar whilst our family is in the U.K. has meant a lot of questions all the time about our family so I thought this would be a nice representation of where our family come from.
Making your family tree
I wanted to include some time outdoors, some arts and crafts and some writing. I’m pretty happy we managed all three!
1. Collect your leaves
First we headed out to the garden to collect a variety of leaves. We made sure that they were big enough for us to write on.
2. Get leaf rubbing
Next we raided the crayons and began the leaf rubbing process!
Place your leaf, upside down, underneath a sheet of paper. Take a crayon on its side and gently rub over the paper revealing the leaf.
The boys were skeptical and quite cross that I’d taken the leaves off their playmobil men, but quickly change their tune when they saw the leaf appear magically.
Cut out all your leaves ready to use. We used whichever colours the boys wanted for a colourful tree but you could keep it all green, or autumn coloured.
3. Paint your tree trunk
On a large piece of paper we painted a tree trunk with plenty of branches to stick our leaves too.
4. Add the names on your leaves
Then I set my 7 year old to work writing our family names on the leaves.
He chose to write first name, year of birth and year of death (where applicable). Then we added the family relationship at the bottom.
A quick call to my mum and we had the year of birth and death for all my grandparents. A quick text out to Cyprus and we managed the names of my husbands grandparents.
5. Add it all together
The final step is to stick the leaves on the tree and voila. A family tree.
Ours is in pride of place on our wall and is probably about a metre tall!
