Book Review 1

I love using children’s books in my lessons about art.  Even the older kids like being read to.  It’s a way to spark their interest in art, encourage a love of reading and make their learning connections much richer.  And, it doesn’t really take that much time to incorporate a short story in the period.   I know class time for art is limited, so you want to make the most of every minute.  Consider just reading a portion of a book (if it is long), just discussing the pictures, or just summarizing long passages of text. 

This summer I went crazy and purchased a whole bunch (like 20) books from amazon.com which were used.  You can often find books for like 1 cent, plus of course, shipping.  I found these books while reading the book Young at Art, which is also a great book for learning about the developmental stages of children’s art.  I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about developing quality early childhood art experiences.  Young at Art focuses mostly on ages 0-5, which was very interesting to me since I have a toddler. Kindergartners could probably do many of these ideas from the book, but it is more geared towards preschool level.  This book is worth looking at for it’s “books related to art” list alone in the back. 
Here’s the book Young at Art:

 I decided I would share with you some of the books I purchased after seeing the lists in Young at Art.  This summer I will do a series of book reviews that you can use in your classroom.  They will be different, and hopefully new-to-you books than the usual art books I have seen used in lesson plans on the internet.  The first one is called The Orange Book, by Richard McGuire and I really love the vintage illustrations in this one.  Here are some pictures from the book:

The story is about 14 oranges and what happens to each of them.  The reason I really like this book, besides the cute illustrations, is that the whole book is colored in BLUE and ORANGE.  Which of course are COMPLEMENTARY colors!  So, I am planning to show this book to my students when I teach about complementary colors.