skip to content
  1. Home/
  2. Dirt Is Good/
  3. Arts & Crafts/
  4. Make a memory tree
A little girl playing indoors.

Make a memory tree

Blue painted background
Your kids can make something truly special to store your family’s keepsakes, most treasured mementos and precious souvenirs in – a Memory Tree!

What you need

  • 2 x coat hangers

  • Plastic bottles

  • Paints and paint brushes

  • Random small items to decorate the tree – feathers, sparkly decorations, and more

  • Fallen sticks with lots of branches

  • Bottle caps

  • Plant pot

  • Polystyrene

  • Egg box

  • Wool

  • Ribbon and material

What to do

Get Ready:

  1. Using the paints, encourage your kids to decorate the collection of sticks and branches.

  2. Tree is ready to assemble by tying a selection of the colourful sticks together.

  3. Now it’s time for the sticks to be secured into the plant pot. To do this, carefully fill the base of the plant pot with polystyrene and stand the sticks into the polystyrene.

  4. To complete the tree, secure bottle caps, such as old lids from laundry bottles, to the branches with string, or hang them off coat hangers attached to the branches. For extra spectacle, make sure your kids decorate the baskets too! Once the entire tree is decorated and the baskets are in place, it’s time to collect some memories!

Have a go:

Now comes the important part, becoming a memory collector! It’s time for kids to get together with family members, asking them about the small personal souvenirs which mean a lot or make them smile. As they keep collecting, they’ll be amazed by the stories behind items the family has kept! Offer a pen and notebook to take notes, if your children are old enough.

There are no limits on the objects they can gather, as long as the items can fit into a Memory Tree basket and are lightweight: think about holiday mementos and souvenirs, tickets, badges, baby ID wrist tags, photos, jewellery… the possibilities are endless.

Try it out:

Kids will need to concentrate as they carefully place the family’s memory objects in the baskets on their tree branches. Test each other to be sure everyone remembers the stories behind each object.