Back-To-School Countdown Tree

As big milestones approach, I like to use a countdown clock to keep track of the days remaining. Sort of like an advent calendar before Christmas, we’ve come up with a number of different countdown crafts for big milestones in the past. Last year, we made paper chains with numbers on them - and ripped off one of the numbered links each day - to countdown the days before the start of school. For the start of summer holidays this year, we made paper suns and pulled off one of the numbers rays each day. So with the start of school right around the corner once again, the girls and I wanted to make a countdown craft. But of course, we had to come up with something different - while I thought of keeping it simple and doing the paper chain again, Lilo insisted that we had to do something new. (What a craft-monster I’ve created!)

Again, wanting to keep it simple, my original thought was just to put a tree picture on the wall with numbered leaves taped to it. But Lilo had other ideas. 3D ideas. So this year, we created countdown trees - with numbered leaves that can be pulled off each day to countdown to the start of school:

To make the trees, we started with a piece of cardboard tube (or in our case, simply a piece of cardboard rolled into a tube). We mounted the tube to a base by cutting an X into a flat, square piece of cardboard - pulling the small triangles from the X upwards, and taping them to the roll. You don’t need to be particularly neat with this step, since it will all be covered up later…

To give the branches some structure, we used bamboo skewers for long ones, and toothpicks for short ones. We simply poked these into the cardboard tube, and taped everything together. (Again, no need to be neat yet - this is just the skeleton…)

Next, I made a super gooey batch of paper mache - and we covered the cardboard tube and skewers with thin stripes of newspaper. The paper mache paste I used was made from flour mixed with boiling water. I had never tried this recipe before, and I don’t think I would use it again, as it got REALLY thick as we were working with it. In the past, I’ve used wallpaper paste diluted with water, and also the a simple mixture of flour and non-boiling water - both of worked well, and were much easier to work with.

Getting all of the branches covered was a bit of a pain, and I ended up helping both girls with this part. Once finished, we let them dry out in the sun for a full day. They took quite a while to dry, since we had to use many layers on some of the branches. Once fully dry, we painted them brown, and then added some black highlights for texture.

(While the trees were drying in the backyard, a caught a confused fly checking them out!)

While the paint was drying, we cut out some leaf and flower shapes. Since the girls are in two different grades they start school on different days: Lilo is going into grade 2 and starts immediately after Labour Day, but Isla’s Junior Kindergarten doesn’t start until the Friday later that week. So two different countdowns means of course we had to make two different trees. For Lilo’s tree we put countdown numbers on all of the leaves. But of course Isla wanted flowers, we used leaves just for decoration and put the the countdown numbers on the flowers.

Have your kids started school yet? Are they excited? Lilo said she’s sad that summer is almost over but she’s excited to meet new friends - I love her attitude.