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

Weaving stories

Click on above image to enlarge and print directions for

making the loom. (If I figure out how to make the

images sharper, I'll switch this!)

Here's a fun weaving project for a group of kids of various ages that is much more about process than product. Make a simple loom with a top and bottom pole, board or branch, and string it with sturdy string or twine. Children take turns weaving strands of various materials through the warp strings. Collect strips of fabric, paper, lace ribbon reeds, stalks, newspaper, long feathers, or other things that might appeal to them.

Ideas:

•Ask children to think of something about themselves they might want to share with the group. Then they can choose a strand that represents their "story": blue for the ocean where they like to swim, brown for their pet hampster, flowers like Grandma's house where they go for vacation and so forth. Some kids might want to be more literal, and write words on a strip of paper.

or

• Begin a group story. In turn, children choose a strand as they add to the ongoing tale, weaving their words together. Example: A little purple dragon goes on a journey....green for the hill he climbs......lace for the princess he meets....as so on. Then see if they can retell the whole story using the strands as visual clues. This might inspire writing projects, too.

or

• The weaving shown here was done by children at a Unitarian Universalist church in Maine. They first made a list of things that were important to them, and then chose strands to weave.

Contributions ranged from the earth, friends, and books, to pizza!

or....?

Your ideas are most welcomed!