Starry Night Printable Book & Art (Van Gogh Study)

I believe that some of the most open-minded individuals when it comes to art are children. And I believe that art is a means for expression, understanding and acceptance of other cultures, as well as a visual chronicle of history.

Now I have a confession to make.

I have been TERRIBLE at exposing my son to fine art. I have no excuses. I have a degree in art history. I worked in an art museum. Heck, I even gave tours there as a volunteer docent. I don’t know what my reservations have been, but it’s time to end the shame and begin sharing some of my dear friends – legendary artists from around the world – with my son. This is my first attempt.

It was inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting. I have seen pictures of it a thousand times and it still leaves me breathless. When I went to the library to look for children’s books about it and left empty-handed, I felt defeated. Not to be thwarted, I made my own book as an introduction to Vincent Van Gogh.

My son fell in love with making books when he was in kindergarten. He still loves it. As he read the Van Gogh book, he asked me, “Is this a library book?” Flattered, I answered “no.” He responded, “Good. I can keep it.” YEAH! My efforts were worth it! (To make your own copy of the book I made, download and print the first three pages, flip the stack of papers over and download and print the remaining pages on the back. Put the pages back in order, fold in the middle, and staple on the fold.)

I had a few goals with the book:

• To show my son where Van Gogh lived (notice the small painting of Holland on page 2).
• To explain why he painted the way he did (using color to portray emotion).
• To get my son thinking about how colors can convey feelings.
• To help my son recognize that there are many variations of each color (e.g. there are hundreds of yellow colors).

He read the book, completed the pages that required it, and then I showed him the painting that inspired our activity in a book I had. Next, he made his own starry night picture.

Supplies:

Marker/colored pencils

Dull lead pencil

Sytrofoam tray (think ground beef or chicken packaging)

Small rolling pin wrapped in cling wrap (or a brayer)

Acrylic paint

Aluminum foil

Gluestick

White paper

First I had my son draw a village, street, or city at the bottom of a piece of paper. Then I gave him the Styrofoam tray and told him to use the dull pencil to draw on it the night sky and how he felt about nighttime. (My son just learned about space in school so he is still full of awe.) His sky had many shapes. I had to admit, it wasn’t at all what I expected. He drew big circles for planets and asteroids. He even threw in a comet. It was space-tacular!

When he was done, we squirted some blue and black paint onto a sheet of aluminum foil and ran our covered rolling pin through it and then over the tray. When it was totally covered in paint, we flipped it over and pressed it onto white paper. It revealed a mirror image!

Then we cut out his streetscape and glued it below. Voila! My son’s own Starry Night was complete!

Want to explore the connection between color and emotion further? Share My Many Colored Days with your child. This untraditional Dr. Suess book is one of my absolute favorites for talking about feelings!

Hunting for 3-D Shapes

My son has a good grasp on simple shapes like the circle, square, and rectangle. I wanted to kick things up a notch and introduce 3-D shapes to him. For a little help, I turned to Stuart J. Murphy's book Captain Invincible and the Space Shapes.

This book is part of the popular Math Start series. It's about a boy and his dog Comet who explore space and navigate their way home, despite encounters with numerous galactic obstacles. Captain Invincible uses 3-D shapes along the way to resolve the problems they face (for example, a cone filters poisonous gas by sucking it in through its circular base and sending out its point). I love the comic-book style of this book and how it pointed out each 3-D shape's form!

Books are great at teaching, but I've noticed what a powerful tool music can be in helping my son with memorization. I found this clever and very catchy video on YouTube and after listening ... okay, maybe there was a little dancing, too ... a few times, it was time to get on with our 3-D shapes hunt.

I gave my son four cards with the names and pictures of the 3-D shapes identified in the music video: the sphere, cylinder, cube, and cone. Then I asked him to explore the house and find two examples of each. Some shapes were easier than others to find. The cone was by far the hardest. I was surprised at how creative his 3-D shape finds were and excited to see him thinking about the differences between 3-D and 2-D (for example, why a circle was NOT a sphere).

I can tell that this song struck a chord with my son. The other night as we were waiting for our food at a local restaurant he started to sing the chorus (I hope the other patrons didn't mind a little lesson in geometry!). When he finished, we played the game "I Spy." The pendant lights were the shape of cones. The salt shakers were the shape of cylinders. 3-D shapes were everywhere!

Roll & Write (with a DIY Dry-Erase Die)

It’s happening – homework! Soon after my son began first grade, he started toting home a list of five words each week. I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure what to do with them. After all, my son could read them without any difficulty and so I just tossed the lists in our mail/bills/household paperwork pile (please tell me we’re not the only family with one of those).

Then a friend whose boy is my son’s best friend enlightened me. Just because my son could read those word-wall words, doesn’t mean he could spell them. Yikes! After mentally beating myself up for a few days, I came up with this little “reusable” activity so those weekly words could get practiced.

First, I made a dry-erase die. To do this, I created a template with squares the same width (2 inches) as Scotch brand packaging tape. I printed it on sticker paper. Then I used post-it notes to mask off the flaps where I’d be gluing the little box together (I didn't think the glue would stay adhered to the slick tape). I added the packaging tape and anywhere that the tape overlapped a sticky note, I carefully lifted the edge of the note and cut along the edge with an Exacto knife.

Afterwards, I peeled the sticker paper's backing off, and stuck the template to the brown side of an empty cereal box I used for sturdiness. Then I cut the whole template out with that same Exacto knife, using a ruler as a straight edge and a cutting board underneath to protect my work surface. 

Once it was cut out, I turned it over and used a ruler and the backside of a butter knife to score the cardboard wherever folding was necessary. Lastly I used my hot glue gun to glue the flaps one or two at a time and folded the box together until the template became a cube. Voila! The tape makes a perfect dry-erase surface!

Next, I used Microsoft Publisher to create a worksheet that has a grid where my son would record the words he rolled.

When my son got home from school, I wrote the words from the list plus one more (die have six sides and I only had 5 words) with a fine-tip dry-erase marker on the die. I also added the words across the top of the worksheet. 

Now all that was left to do was hand it over to my son.

Every time he rolled a word, he wrote it in the appropriate column. When any one column was completely full, he was done. Surprisingly the dry-erase words held up well, without much smearing.  

Download the die template and Roll & Write worksheet here.

My son had loads of fun with this and enjoyed predicting which word he would roll the most times. Whew! Now I can look his teacher in the eye!

Pretzel Rod "Log" Cabin

Have you ever noticed that those long pretzel rods kind of look like logs? I did and I couldn't let that little discovery be wasted. Knowing how my son loves building stuff out of LEGOs, Fisher-Price TRIO blocks, etc., I knew that this little construction project would be a big hit.

While he was at school I rescued a cardboard box from the recycling bin and cut it into a base, onto which we'd be gluing our logs (aka pretzel rods) to build a "log" cabin. Here are the dimensions I used (click on the picture to enlarge):

The only dimension that's truly important is the length of your log cabin's long sides. To save yourself the trouble of splitting your logs, it's easier to make this the same length of the pretzel rods.

You'll also want to cut another piece of cardboard the same length as your long walls (7 3/4 inches if you're using my measurements) or slightly longer by 4 or 5 inches wide for the roof. (You can cut this in two and tape back together or crease it heavily in half to make the roof.)

After school, I handed my son a book by Dana Meachen Rau about log cabins to read. Not only did he discover that log logs go on each side of the cabin with shorter logs used on the ends, but he also expanded his vocabulary learning words like "notches" and "shingles."

When we finished the book, I gave my son the cardboard and a small low-temp glue gun. After lecturing him that he needed to be careful, my son glued the small 2-inch flap to enclose the house. Then he peeled the backing off a green piece of felt and stuck it to a flat rectangle of cardboard I had leftover from the box I used. He glued around the bottom of the cardboard cabin and placed it on top of our "grass." Now it was time to get building.

While the traditional approach to log-cabin building requires that the logs be notched, we skipped that step and just got busy gluing the long pretzel rods up the side of our log cabin. When we did the short sides, he just broke the pieces to the approximate length. Be warned, there'll be LOADS of sawdust (aka crumbs) on the construction site.

If you like pretzels like we do, plan ahead and buy two bags of pretzel rods (we ate too many and ran out!). Get creative with what you shingle your roof with. I had plans to use Wheat Thins, but when I went to get them from the pantry, there were only five or six left in the box (apparently they make an even better snack than a roof). Instead we used rectangles cut from brown craft foam that we overlapped.

Since I knew the log cabin would get played with a lot, we didn't glue the roof down. Sure enough, as soon as we were done, my son was off to get some of his Imaginext figures and dinosaurs (which perplexed me) to play in and around the cabin.

As I tidied up, my son asked for some paper. Of course, I obliged. I nearly fell over when I saw what he did next: he wrote a story about the dinosaurs wanting to go in the cabin and the Imaginext dude hiding there!

That story made cleaning up all those crumbs and gluey strings worth it for sure!

Milk Chocolate Multiplication

Can a first-grader really do multiplication? I thought I’d find out. My son loves math, candy, and books so this activity was right up his alley.

If you recreate this activity with your child, you need three things:


#1 The Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Multiplication Book by Jerry Pallotta.

#2 A Hershey’s bar or two.

#3 The “Draw it, Count it, Multiply it” worksheet I made (download it here).

Pallotta’s book served as a great way to expose my son to an entirely new kind of math sentence, using rows of the candy bar’s sections to illustrate multiplication. After we’d finished the book, I opened our candy bar and asked my son what the multiplication problem would be: 3 (rows) x 4 (columns). Then he counted the sections for the answer: 12. I broke off some rows and we continued to identify the multiplication problem our now smaller candy bar provided us.

I’m not going to lie, we both ate a fair amount of chocolate doing this activity (MMMMmmmm).

After doing this for awhile, we flipped over the laminated worksheet I’d made. I used a fine-tip dry-erase marker to fill in the boxes at the top and asked him to make that number of squares across and down and complete all the boxes in between. When he’d done this I asked him to complete the multiplication sentence at the bottom of the page and reminded him about what he’d drawn (e.g. 3 rows of 5 squares equals how many squares altogether?). We did about 5 problems before quitting for the day.

TIP:  Avoid using a black dry-erase marker. Ours made it difficult to distinguish where the dots were and make the squares. After discovering this, we switched to a lighter color marker.

Even if it was a little advanced for a six-year-old, my son loved this introduction to multiplication (it wasn’t just the chocolate he enjoyed, I swear!). This is a skill we can easily build on and, by laminating the worksheet, we can just wipe it clean to practice over and over!

In the future, I think I'll use a die to help us decide which numbers to multiply. Since this is new to my son, keeping both numbers below six will work great.