It is that time of the year when I complain about living in a season less city. Last year during fall we picked up ourselves and had fun with so many fall crafts fall wreath, big fall tree, propeller bugs and many more. You can take a look at all our fall crafts by visiting us category page.

This post is our first one of the many fall crafts we have for the season.

Musical fall craft using a bottle and leaves

Last week we did a fantastic fall play recipes series with a few fellow bloggers. For our nature theme we did these beautiful fall sensory jars.. We had so many leaves left over and I kept finding my kids shaking them and playing and giggling. My almost 3 year old said “mom this bag sounds like maracas”. Of course! That’s the birth of this fall craft.

I found a couple of empty water bottles from our recycle stash. Tip: It is better to find a bottle without ridges for better visibility. If you are going to decorate  the maraca doesn’t matter.

I invited the kids to create their own musical maracas. I laid out all the dried fall leaves and the bottles in a tray.My toddler knew exactly what to do and got about busy. Talk about some practicing her fine motor skills!. We started filling up the bottles with the leaves. So much learning and creating was going during the simple process of filling up the bottles it was pure joy to watch those.

She first started breaking off the stalks from the leaves and putting them inside the bottle.

 She tried breaking the leaves into bits and then added the leaves. She tried adding the whole leaf ad tried to squish it through the opening. We also learned that dried leaf bits made more noise than dried whole leaf. The kids also added small twigs and pods.

 We also learned that the partially green leaves do not make noise.  The girls thought that the leaves filled bottle was beautiful. Don’t you think?

We did not fill up the bottle all the way with leaves. The leaves  need some room to make those fun sounds.

We even glued on a few a few colorful silk fall leaves. The same leaves we used in our fall sensory jars and fall sensory bin.

Time to shake the maracas and make music.

Oh the kids! They both had grand time with the maracas, shaking, dancing and just going crazy

Thanks for reading

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Check out our resourceful e-book filled with many preschool play ideas.

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