Using Picture Books in the Elementary Art Room

Grumpy Ladybug - Author Eric Carl

It is a book that I use as the basis for several courses that I offer to toddlers.
• Clay Beetle Lesson: In this lesson, my children make a ladybug out of clay with a pot as a base. I like this manual because it is very short and sweet. My students have the opportunity to touch the mat for the first time, so we make it easy for them.
• Grumpy Ladybug Collage : In this project, I teach my students about textures, then they create several hand-drawn maps with a scraper. Then we cut and glue these sheets to create a collage.

Snowmen of the Night - Author: Caralyn Buhner, Illustrator: Mark Buhner

Snowmen at Night is one of my favorite books to read in class! Kids love rhyming words and I love illustrations!
I use this book to introduce my second year students to our Winter Value Landscape project! In this tutorial we will explore value as an element of art and explain how to create the illusion of shades, shades, lights, shadows and depth in our work, both in projection and in shape. This is one of my most appreciated lessons! You can read a blog post about it here or visit the APS Store for a more detailed written lesson (using PowerPoint)!

Pencils How Saved the Rainbow - Screenplay: Monica Svini, Illustrator: Feronia Parker Thomas

Have you seen a nicer kindergarten class?! After reading the book, I talk to my friends in a "rainbow sequence". It's something everyone learned long before I mentioned it (does the rainbow send a message to anyone?). The only difference they hear between the "artistic rainbow arrangement" and the "rainbow arrangement" is the lack of indigo.
Indigo is a contentious point for me. The only time we talk about Indigo is when we teach ROYGBIV. Is it on the color wheel? neeeee. Maybe that's why I grew up as a teacher, but I'm not a fan of indigo because most of my color theory is based on the color wheel.
If you still like indigo, you can read more about the rainbow in this book. But when I present a mosaic class on colored paper, my students let go.
Because my class is divided into color cards, I ask you to create a colored sheet of paper that matches the color of each color card. After drying it overnight, I cut this paper into small pieces and placed a bit of each color on each table for my students to use in a rainbow paper mosaic. You can find more information about this manual here on my blog.

Snowballs - Author: Lois Ehlert

What a wonderful book to teach students about collage/montage! Lois Ehlert creates the most beautiful books! I've used this book before to teach a few different lessons...but these days I'm using it more and more to teach my kids the snowman collage project. A report on this lesson can be found here .

Monsters don't eat broccoli - Writer: Barbara Jean Hicks, Illustrator: Sue Hendra

This is one of my favorite books to use in the art room! It's not just a rhyming book (KIDS LOVE), but it also has amazingly beautiful illustrations that will help teach ideas to create the illusion of depth. It has very clear foregrounds, middle foregrounds, backgrounds, showing objects shrinking in space, overlapping, etc. which has pages.
I usually use this book when teaching my undergrads to create space and then explore plot ideas. If you want to check out my manual, you can check it out here .

Mouse Paint - Author: Ellen Stoll Walsh

Mouse Paint is a great book for learning to mix colors at the K-1 level. As my lessons have changed over the years, I have used this book in many different projects. Here are a few:
• Cut and glue penguins : In this lesson, my first graders learned how to mix colors, then we used that knowledge to draw a colorful background for a collage.
• Delaunay Tissue Paper Collage : In this lesson, CP students learned to mix colors and then looked at the colorful work of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. They then created their own abstract collages of textured paper, demonstrating their knowledge of color mixing and folding. This project is a fun alternative to learning how to mix colors with paint.
• Kandinsky's colored circles : this is one of the first lessons I learned! In this lesson, students learned how to mix colors and then looked at the work of my favorite artist, Vasily Kandinsky. Of course, we looked at his painting Concentric Circles and Square (1913) and then talked about how he had to mix paint to get certain colors. Students then performed a step-by-step drawing experiment to create their own series of concentric circles.

Mouse Shapes - Author: Ellen Stoll Walsh

If you still don't understand, I'm a fan of Ellen Stoll Walsh's books. :) This book is a PERFECT way to introduce the idea of ​​combining shapes to create larger, more complex shapes or pictures (this also affects general kindergarten basic geometry standards).
However, as my classes have changed over the years, I have used this book in several different projects:
• Shape Trains : In this lesson children practice using glue sticks and learn the basics of connecting shapes to create shape trains.
• Cut and glue the owl : I've gone through this tutorial in many ways (with different books), but my latest version is to use this book before we start cutting out shapes to create our own owl collages.
• Tangram : After reading the Mouse Shapes book, students manipulate shape blocks to solve tangram puzzles (click link to find FREE tangram downloads I've used with my students).

Louise Art Loves - Author Kelly Light

This is the first lesson I learned from my amazing observant teacher - now I'm using it with my first year! Louise Loves Art is a book about a little girl who created her greatest masterpiece (a picture of a cat), but then her younger brother cut it up and made something else out of it (the greatest masterpiece -work). We use that as a starting point to talk about the idea of ​​taking something and turning it into something else. We take this transformation idea and apply it to turn the letter of the alphabet into an animal image! Click here to see the full guide, including a very nice extension.