Learning About Illustrations

Thanks to a recommendation by Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns, we've buried ourselves in books by Loreen Leedy this week. Her books our wonderful, because they cover wide variety of educational topics, for different age ranges of children.

We settled on Look at My Book, How Kids Can Write & Illustrate Terrific Books, for our stART project today (stART is a weekly, story + ART link up, hosted by A Mommy's Adventures).

Look at My Book, which walks children through writing, and illustrating their own stories, was too advanced for my youngest two, ages three and five, but they were content enough, to sit through an abbreviated reading. The older girls read it themselves, yesterday.

For stART, we focused in on the illustrating portion of the book, which describes how different styles of drawing, and different art supplies, can change an illustration. This was something we had observed while reading through different adaptations of Hans Christian Andersen's stories. The illustrations can make, or break even the best of stories.

I printed out four copies of a coloring sheet, for each of the girls. They colored in one picture with crayons, one with colored pencils, one with markers, and painted the last with wacky watercolors.

I wanted them to fill one in with torn paper, for a collage effect, but the girls weren't interested in that at all, and seemed to get the idea of the project, anyway. Of course, once the paints were out, all bets were off, and they abandoned the project for free form painting, instead.

For more story stretching arts and crafts projects, check out this week's stART link up at A Mommy's Adventures.

It's great to be a homeschooler.