Easy Fall Crafts for Toddlers

My little guy is turning three in a month (wow, when did that happen??) and we've been having all sorts of fall fun.  We already went to the pumpkin patch in our new little town.  We didn't purchase pumpkins there, but he had great fun.  We did purchase pumpkins elsewhere and he just can't wait to carve them!

To keep the fall fun going on some of these rainy days we've had here, we did a couple of really really simple fall crafts with a few things that we already had and can be easily picked up at any craft store.

Our first craft...giant spiders (friendly ones, of course!)  All you need is some construction paper cut into circles (I had some already cut from a previous project), pipe cleaners, a hole punch, and crayons/markers/whatever.  I didn't have googly eyes, but those would make an excellent addition!

Just put eyes on the circle and let your little one decorate his/her spider with crayons or markers...if you don't mind the mess, glitter is fun too...but since I don't want to be cleaning up glitter until my son leaves for college, I stuck with crayons.  Once he was done, I punched eight holes in the edge and twisted the pipe cleaners around them to look like legs.  Bam!  Insta-spider.  He was so thrilled that he played with his spiders all day and we even folded the legs up and sent one to his aunt.  

Another craft we did, also super easy and simple, is very similar to one we did with edible finger paints a while back.  Now that he's older we used regular paint and instead of our fingers, we used a bunched up paper towel.  You'll need a canvas sheet, letter stickers, paint, and paper towels.  

On the canvas, place your letters to spell out whatever fall phrase you want.  I'm a minimalist at heart so I just said 'fall' and left him lots of room to make beautiful fall 'leaves'.  Then I basically squirted a glob of yellow, red, and orange paint on a plate and gave him a bunched up paper towel and let him have at it.  I did help a little to make sure the canvas was completely covered, but he really did most of it himself.  The fall colors blended together very nicely.  Once he was finished and before the paint was dried, I VERY CAREFULLY peeled off the letters revealing the negative image of 'fall' amongst the leaves.  Absolutely adorable and looks great next to my cinnamon broom and a colorful gourd we picked out.