Learning is fun: Letter L

I do not find the idea of displaying decomposing plant matter on the wall all that appealing, but a number of factors led to this week's craft, namely:

1. God has littered our yard with an awesome amount of craft materials that are perfect for this week's letter.
   
2. Justin pointed out it was silly to stamp leaves on paper when we have plenty of actual leaves outside.
3. After three unsuccessful attempts, I was finally ready to admit that I simply cannot draw a leaf pattern to make the sponge stamps I wanted to use this week.

We've been working on the concept of what letter comes next (as opposed to just reciting the alphabet from memory), so I started this craft by making Abby figure out what letter we were going to work on today. I showed her all the crafts we've made so far hanging up in the playroom, and asked her what came after the K.

"Make a letter L craft!" she replied, clearly proud of herself for figuring that out. I affirmed her answer, high fived her little hand, and told her to go find her shoes. We trekked outside, picked out a few too many lovely leaves, which she proceeded to ruin by crunching them down into the little yellow cup she had brought along to hold her stash. I followed close behind, picking up similar leaves and not crushing them while she continued to fill her cup with leaf pieces until she was satisfied that she had enough to work with.Back inside, I looked up how to press leaves properly while Abby arranged her collection on the table, placing each leaf down gently and repeating "Look how pretty!" with each one. I used a little mommy sleight of hand to replace her crumpled leaves with my more usable ones, and showed her how to lay them out flat on a paper towel. Next, we picked out two heavy books and she grunted for me as I placed them on top of our leaves to flatten them out. While the leaves were busy being flattened, I set her to work coloring our letter L in some pretty fall colors. I was prepared for a mess when I pulled out the paintbrush, but she surprised me by keeping all of the paint on the brush or the paper. Sometimes she's weirdly obsessive about staying clean. (Other times, not so much.)
While she painted, I tried my best to press our leaves with some wax paper and an iron, and failed miserably. Four times. In the process, I also ruined most of our remaining leaves, so I finally resolved to quit while I was ahead. Our quiet morning craft time was running out, and with Caleb about to wake up from his nap, I packed up the paint and the leaves and decided to take the kids to the park.

Back home, we ate lunch and regrouped to finish The Craft that Took All Day. And I realized that Abby was just as happy gluing down the leaves themselves as she would have been to glue down neatly pressed wax paper leaves. Later, we'll head to Kinko's for the last part of our day-long craft activity: Laminate a Leafy Letter L.