Cuckoo by Lois Ehlert inspired Art

It’s virtual Book Club for Kids time again and this time it’s Lois Ehlert as the Author of the month. We have looked through the variety of books and boy are there some really amazing ones and decided because we had spent the last week in Lanzarote and J is very interested in “What is something in Spanish?” that we would go for Cuckoo by Lois Ehlert – A Mexican Folk Tale as it has the story in English and in Spanish.

We read the book at our weekly book club meeting this afternoon – luckily my friend is a better Spanish speaker than me mine is very rusty and she read the story in Spanish and then I read the story in English. We then looked at the images in the book and talked about how they were made and started our activity of creating some Cuckoo inspired art work.

Cuckoo Inspired Artwork – Materials

Aluminum Foil
Pens and Pencils
Scissors
White Paper
Gummed Paper – for those outside of the UK here is it on Amazon.com

Cuckoo Inspired Art work – How to

For the book club we started off with some metal art work. I cut up some aluminum foil into shapes from the book – Parrot, Tree, Flower and Star and then added a selection of different pens and pencils to decorate them with. Ball point pens and sharp pencils work best at making imprints on the foil.

J, T and their friend A set about decorating their metal work with the pens – this has been asked for since and I will have to keep a supply of cut up shapes for J to draw on as he loves the effect that it gives on the other side of the foil as well.

For our second activity I took inspiration again from the book and the different shapes that made up all of the animals in it as well as the bright vibrant colours. I recently brought some Gummed Paper Squares and decided these would be perfect – instead of using glue they work like old style stamps that you lick the back and it sticks to the paper (although a paint brush and some water work just as well) so I set about quickly cutting them up into Circles, zig zag shapes, petal shapes, rectangles, different sized squares as well as odd shapes that I made from the cut offs.

They then set to creating some pictures with the shapes – J and T loved this – T especially the licking of the shapes – she became our official licker! J created 3 pictures from the different shapes – he had a lot of fun over lapping the shapes and creating unique pictures.