"Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons"

my example

 We read Pete The Cat and his four Groovy Buttons by Eric Litwin Created and illustrated by James Dean. The projects Pete the Cat and his Four Groovy Buttons based on this book was pretty simple just making button shirts to go with the book.I folded construction paper in half to make symmetrical t- shirt cuts and pre-cut the shirts and the buttons for the kids.

In the book the Cat has a shirt with four big bright buttons on it but one by one they pop off.
We focused on the buttons being on the shirt for the project but I also thought that we could have done this with pipe cleaners and some tape so the buttons actually popped off the paper shirt back ground.

Of course in this project as with any variation in the projects in pretty interesting. Some kids colored the shirts while other did not and some only wanted three buttons, some did not want the buttons in normal button placement.

 

Tissue paper cat collage

Based on the book "There are Cats In This Book" by Vivanne Schwartz. We used red and blue tissue paper to create a collage background. We used a mixture of glue and water and a paint brush to apply a layer of glue and water to the white paper background then brushed another layer on top. We created the collage tissue paper backgrounds and then drew cats from yellow construction paper to glue with a glue stick on top of the tissue paper background. You can add two or three cats if you like and in the children's drawings of the cats you will get great variation. Below is a you tube video clips of this awesome interactive pop up book.This book is great fun to read to a young child.This is also a great way to review primary colors.

Art projects based on children's books

 I just finished a parent and child class at the art gallery. I prepared several projects based on Children's books. The first project I would like to share is a project based on Eric Carle’s “The Grouchy Lady Bug”

We used ceramic clay to make pinch pots and flipped them over then added a small mound of clay for the heads. We poked two holes in the hole with a pencil in order to hot glue wire antennae into them later. We used white oil pastels to draw leaves onto white paper and then brushed green water color onto them.

When the bugs were finished being fired we painted them with acrylic paints in two steps body and head then dots when the under coat of red dried. We cut the leaves and trimmed them up and glued them onto foam core board with tacky glue. After hot gluing the antennae on  I used a caulking adhesive glue to attach the ceramic bugs to the foam core board.