StArt- Frida

One of my favorite artist is the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. I was fortunate enough to see some of her original works and visit one of her homes while staying in Guanajuato, Mexico.

I was very excited to find a children's book that discusses the life and art of Frida Kahlo. We own the Spanish version of this book but it is also available in English. It is worth checking out the book just to see the unique and interesting illustrations.

One of the things that we learned about Frida was that she learned to paint by copying the paintings of other artists while she was bedridden with illness. We had not painted for quite a while so on this lovely autumn day we drug out the easel and painted out in the backyard. The boys (well, Diego) tried to copy some of the paintings from the book. Mateo, who LOVES to paint, had fun mixing colors and ended up painting his arms and face and calling himself "Hulk."

Diego did SEVERAL paintings but one of my favorites was this copy of the skeleton seen below. We will definitely do this process of copying works from different artists again. It was good practice paying attention to detail and sparked his interest in artists.

I am linking this to StArt at A Mommy's Adventures.

El Primer Día de Acción de Gracias or The First Thanksgiving

In Spanish "Thanksgiving" is translated as "el Día de Acción de Gracias." I know, it is a mouthful. I bought this book, El Primer Día de Acción de Gracias from a Scholastic book fair at my son's school because my library did not have many books about Thanksgiving in Spanish. Not terribly surprising since it is an American holiday. This book written for older kids so it was a little over my son's head. However, with some editing and further explanation, I think that it gave D a good overview of the history of Thankgiving.

After reading the book, we BOTH made coffee filter turkeys. What? I can't have fun too? ;0)

They are very easy to do. First, color with a marker on the coffee filter.

Next, wet the coffee filter. Our spray bottle is out of commission so D used a medicine dropper. This was BY FAR his favorite part. Now he wants to get all of his crafts wet!

Make a body, face, and in D's case, legs.
To find out more fun StART projects to do with books, visit A Mommy's Adventures.