The olive tree is a symbol of the Gathering of Israel. Because of that, it is a major focus of the Unit in the Millennial Instructor.
The first section is focused on educating the heart which includes the arts. There is music, art, poetry and stories.
The very first story is about a little boy who’s family owns and works in an olive grove or orchard in Israel. He talks about gathering the olives as a family and the traditions that surround their harvest day.
So the kids and I chose to create an olive tree craft. I found an image of it online in Greek but the image was enough and we figured it out from there.
Olive Tree Craft
Supplies:
7-10 tiny twigs per picture/tree*
Green construction paper
Dried black beans
Scissors
Hot glue gun with hot glue
glue stick or Elmer’s glue
Card stock or cardboard for the back
Gather and hot glue down the twigs in a row on the card stock or cardboard to create the trunk of the olive tree.**
Cut out thin leaf shapes (about 1/2 and inch wide and 1 1/2 inches long) using the green construction paper. We used two shades of green just for fun.
Using a glue stick we glued the leaves on the card stock.
Gather the black beans (olives) and hot glue them on the tree wherever you’d like.***
*twigs thinner (about half as thick) than a pencil will be best
**We experimented with putting the glue on the twig OR the card stock and found that gluing the card stock made it far less likely that we would get burned by the hot glue. Since the kids are so young, I glue the card stock and they carefully placed the stick on the glue.
***I glued. They put the bean on. I let my oldest (5) do her own glue for part of this. She was very excited to do a big girl job. The tricky part was that you had to be careful when placing the bean that you don’t touch the hot glue. We each did get burned a couple times but the less glue you use the less likely you are to get burned. You could also probably use some Elmers glue but I’m not positive it could hold the beans if you wanted to display it vertically or on your fridge.
The kids and I had a blast making this and reading the story about Ilan and his family olive grove.