Turtles in the tree house

Click on instructions to enlarge and print.




Three small friends came for lunch in my tree house last week. After lunch, they made turtle puppets and then created a puppet show with them. From the tree house, you can watch the critters in Frog Song Pond who appear in my books, Turtle Splash and Scoot. We had a great time!

Make a Book

Summer! Time to head down to the library and pick a pile of books! There are so many ways to extend a book's content and value with art activities. These can, in turn, inspire kids to hunt out more books, too.

They can also create their own simple books. Stack several sheets of paper, fold them in half,

and you're ready to go. Fasten with staples, punched holes and ribbon, or a favorite of mine, shown here: Use a twig and a rubber band to bind the pages together.

In addition to visual story telling, this is a great way for kids to figure out sequence. What comes first? next? how does it end? Drawings can also be done separately, and then pasted into the book when they're finished.

Happy Reading!

More prints!

A rainy day for a retreat for families in a conference center on the coast of Maine. Cocoa, puzzles, games....and printmaking!

Guy Prints

A friend and I spent the day running a printmaking workshop for teen boys today at an alternative school on the Maine & New Hampshire border. These young men approached the medium in their own unique ways, but all enjoyed experimenting with ink on paper. Since this was a new experience, we decided to just focus on found-object printing:

bits of hardware, keys, leaves, vegetables, jar lids, and a bunch of that junk that seems to accumulate in basements, drawers and garage corners. We used waterbase printing ink in the three primary colors, newsprint, copy paper, a handful of brayers, and old cookie sheets for rolling out the ink.

This photo by Roger Marchand

We were thrilled to see the concentration, cooperation, exploration and conversation!

Make Lunch!

I recently ran a children's program in conjunction with the Martin Luther King Breakfast in Portland, Maine. The event theme was Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds, and featured two of my books: Feast for 10 and Mystery Vine. One of the nine activity stations invited children to create their own collage lunch of healthy food. I had some precut shapes, a box of scraps, scissors, glue, and paper plates. (The lunches they created turned out to be much healthier than the breakfast provided for the event!) Anyway, I thought this might be a fun activity to do at home or school, too--and might even inspire some cooking with "real" food.

Snow Much Fun