• Look at the difference you get when you put the paint on the smooth and veined side of the leaf.
• What colours are you using? Can you mix your paints to match the colour of the leaf? And is the leaf all one colour anyway? Do the colours seem to change when they're close together? What effect do different colours have when they're put together? Maybe it would be fun to choose unrealistic colours. Pink and tangerine leaves, anyone?
• Do you get a different effect when you use a paintbrush to apply the paint from when you use a sponge? What about the amount of paint you put on, or how hard you press down - do they make a difference?
• Make patterns by printing all over the paper. Try using different leaves - different shapes or the same one in different sizes. Then try using just one leaf. What can you do to get different effects? Can you use the same leaf, and the same colour and still get a range of effects?
• Look at the spaces between the prints. How important is it? What happens when you close it up? When there's hardly any? Can you choose where and what to print with the spaces between in mind?
• Try printing over patterns you've already made. What happens to the colours? Experiment with using layers of prints.

Things To Do With The Prints You've Made

• Cut them out (either closely round each leaf shape, or in groups, or in an oval keeping some of the paper). Use them to make a frieze round the top of a wall, or a frame round another picture (you could stick them to a wooden or card frame.)
• Make lots, and cover a whole wall with them. If you like them enough to want to keep them, consider covering them with a couple of thin coats of varnish.
• Use them to cover exercise books, or as the covers of home-made books. Protect them with tacky-back plastic for durability.
• Cut them out and stick them on folded card to use for greetings.

Extend this activity by:

• Instead of printing by pressing the painted surface of the leaf to the paper, dab paint round the outline of the leaf so that you end up with a circle of paint around the outline of a leaf.
• Printing with other household objects - the lids from toothpaste tubes, the bottoms of yoghurt pots, and in fact anything with an intriguing outline or texture all make interesting prints.
• Printing using hands and feet (and have fun at bathtime straight afterwards....)
• Using the cut surfaces of vegetables to print with. Younger children can use them as they are. With supervision, older ones can cut into them to make shapes.
• Block printing with sponges. Pan scourers are good. Here, a lot of the interest comes from the texture of the sponges; but you can also cut into the sponge to make shapes.

Educational Insights:

• Basic skills - using paintbrushes and scissors.
• Science - before you start painting, examine the leaves. Talk about their structure, what role they play in the plant, and why they change colour and fall off the branches.
• Design Technology - decide what you want your prints to look like, and how you have to change what you are doing to get the result you want, remembering to change only one variable at a time.
• Language - talk about what the leaves look like and how you could describe them. Discuss what you're doing as you go along. Use appropriate vocabulary to describe the process.
• Art - Look at the colour and texture of the leaves really closely - and then do the same with your prints. Try colour mixing, and experiment with different combinations of colours.