We don't do a lot of finger painting in our classroom, but we probably should! The children love to stick their hands and fingers into the paint - even when supplied with brushes and instructions to use them! :) This past week, I thought, why fight it? Painting is fun, but indulging in the act of dipping hands and fingers into the paint makes it an awesome sensory experience, as well! So we did some fall tree finger painting and saw quite the variety of results! There were trees with small fingerprint leaves evenly distributed around the page... trees with large blobs of leaves and fully painted trunks and branches... and then there were the full-on hand smeared extravaganzas! That reminds me. You'll want to have paint smocks on hand as well as some damp paper towels for finger wiping at the table! But surprisingly, the finger painting process was not much messier than when we use paint brushes. When I prepared this craft, I cut the tree shapes out of brown paper. The students then glued the tree cut outs onto a blue page before they started painting. Another option would be to print copies of a tree image on blue paper and then have the children do the painting directly on the page. The students could then colour or paint the tree trunk AND add the leaves. (And you would save time by not having to cut anything out!) If you'd like to try this craft in your classroom, you may want to download the free tree printable below. And if you'd like to try a similar, but more involved project, you may want to download this page of 4 trees. Your class could paint one for each season! If you decide to try worksheet #2, you may want to do one tree at a time to avoid confusion (and lots of smudging!) Since the trees on this printable are smaller, you may also want to consider having the students paint the leaves on these trees with a Q-tip rather than their fingers - or at least offering the suggestion! To be notified of more ideas and freebies like this, just click on the sidebar of my blog to receive my posts by e-mail. I post a couple of new ideas every week! To download the tree images, just click {here}.