We Made a Giant Tree

by Jenny

I've been working on Fruit of the Spirit ~ A Homeschool Study with my kids and we decided it would be fun to make a giant tree to hang all of our fruits on. If you wanted to do the study and wanted a tree on a smaller scale you could make one on posterboard, or make one just 2-D, I'm sure there's tons of tree clip art you could print as well.
I began my hunt for brown paper that would be long enough. I found this great roll of wrapping paper at Deals, a $1 store, that was brown on the back side and just had small white vine and flowers on the right side. This tree only took one roll of paper!

Supplies:

$1 roll of brown paper

clear packing tape

sticky tack

 

(It only cost me a dollar because I already had the sticky tack and tape...)
I began by cutting a piece about 4-5 feet long and crinkling it accordion style.

Then I cut down at different lengths to create limbs and roots from the bottom. I wrinkled each limb, twisting some and curving the ones on sides.

I used some scrap cardboard to fold a triangle to form a base for the back of the tree in the corner. I gathered the paper tighter in the middle to form a smaller trunk leave it wider at the base and top. I used packing tape to secure it to the trunk and then to the wall.

We decided to put the tree floating from the ground because of our very curious 18 month old who would love to rip down all our work.

After we got that part up there, I felt the top limbs just looked weird, all cut the same length so we created additional limbs. I cut the paper strips width-wise in about 6-12 inches and wrinkled those, cutting down to split them into two limbs at the top. Then I secured them behind the original with clear tape and sticky tack. (By the way, my tip for sticky tack is to warm it up with your hands before you use it, and mix a package of blue and white together for a sticky, non-oily combo.)

Adding some branches definitely helped but we wanted to have plenty of space to hang our fruit so I added some long skinny branches to go around the corner. We plan on having over 30 pieces of paper with verses on it so we definitely needed some long ones.

Now to add our Fruit...

If you end up making a giant tree, I'd love to see pictures or hear how you did yours!