Art Storytime

"Everything you can imagine is real." -Pablo Picasso

The Lawrence Public Library is collaborating with the Lawrence Arts Center for "Summer in the City", this year's new summer reading program. So, with that in mind I thought it would be fun to give the Arts Center a shout out with "Art Storytime".

Even thought I've done a similar theme with Starry Night Storytime in the past, choosing books for this storytime was incredibly hard. There are so many great ones to choose from. I also had a hard time narrowing down a craft, so we ended up making two crafts, a Peit Mondrian-Inspired Collage and Wearable Mini-Masterpieces Buttons.

Art Storytime Line-Up:

Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh

The library has a super-size version of this book which is very appealing to use for storytime. It's also an excellent book use when teaching the color wheel and color mixing.  The kids know it and love it. With good reason.

Alphab'art by Anne Guery and Oliver Dussutour

Using famous works, this books asks the reader to find the hidden letters of the alphabet in each famous painting.  I did not read this book to the kids, but using that idea we did play an I-Spy game together with a few of the paintings/hidden letters. Peit Mondrain is featured for the letter "F", so it was a fun way to tie in our artist inspiration behind the storytime craft.

Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse by Eric Carle

Before reading this title, I started out by telling the kids that one of the fun aspects of art is that when you paint a horse it doesn't have to be brown, or white, or black. It can be any color you can dream it to be.

Jeremy Draws a Monster by Peter McCarty

We are on a Peter McCarty kick in our house, so I couldn't resist his first Jeremy book. If you liked this book,  I encourage you to check out The Monster Returns.

I'm the Best Artist in the Ocean by Kevin Sherry

This is one of L's favorite books. Kids love Kevin Sherry's goofy Squid who likes to be the biggest and the best.

Art by Patrick McDonnell

Love this book. Love Patrick McDonnell. Loved using this book to end an art-tastic storytime.

Art Storytime Crafts:

The first craft was a Piet Mondrian-inspired puzzle collage inspired by this post from The Crafty Classroom. I really like that this craft could be as simple or as complex as you make it out to be and that it also teaches shape and primary color recognition.

Materials used: White cardstock, colored cardstock, sharpie, ruler, scissors, and glue.

Pre-storytime, using a ruler and a sharpie, I made two templates inspired by Mr. Mondrian's work on white cardstock.

A simple version...

And a more complex version for the older kids.

After these were finished I photocopied as many copies I would need to hand out to each child at storytime onto cardstock.

I also photocopied the designs on the colored paper as well.

And cut out the shapes from the colored paper.

Then when it was time for the craft after storytime, the kids were instructed to find like-shapes and to glue them to their template. They could glue as many shapes or as few as they'd like. They are the artists so they're the ones calling the shots.

I also had washable markers available to them if they wanted to color in any of the spaces.

Like so.

The older kids had a lot of fun sorting through all the different shapes to see which ones worked out in the templates provided.

I wish I had taken pictures of a few of the kids' creations, because they did a fantastic job with this craft.

For the second craft....

Our library now owns a button maker (Yeee!), which my co-worker generously loaned to Sunday's Storytime. For our second craft we made what I call "Wearable Mini-Masterpieces". I sized and printed out mini-Screams and mini-Mona Lisas for the kids to color in. They could also make their own drawing or draw faces on our "Summer in the City" icons. After their masterpiece was pressed, they wore their artwork around like proud little artists.

Next week it's a day all about dads for "Father's Day Stortyime".

Till then!