I know we're officially in the Christmas countdown now, but we still have some beautiful colors from our trees! The other morning we went for a walk with friends with no clear plan besides collecting pretty leaves. When we got back home we rummaged in our craft drawer, and with just construction paper and contact paper (really! that's it!) we came up with these cute little leaf friends!

First we sorted through the leaves they'd collected to try to weed out any dirty/wet ones. We left way ore than they'd need, and a variety of colors and shapes so that they could pick their favorites!

Then we cut out some rough shapes from construction paper for the bodies and beaks, etc.

Then we had the kids place the pieces on the sticky side of a piece of contact paper:

Then they placed leaves over the "bodies" for feathers (or quills, for our hedgehog!):

And then we just helped by putting a second piece of contact paper on top when they were done! They look really pretty in a window (but were surprisingly hard to photograph there, so here they are making one of our walls more festive. :)

I think this was the kids' favorite craft from the last few months! So simple, and they could do almost all of it themselves, so they were very proud. :) I'm already thinking about doing a whole woodland scene in our front windows next fall!