Happy Birthday, Dear Peter!

Febuary was Black History Month.  In honor of the 50th birthday of Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day, the first children's book featuring an African-American protagonist, we created our own snowy days.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, this lesson was planned for February, but a number of different circumstances prevented that, and we actually did the project in early March.  However, since we have snow around here until May, it will still be "a snowy day" for a long while!

I have always loved the illustrations in this book, particularly the snow.  I love Keats' use of color in the snow and the stamped/printed snowflakes in all sorts of pastel colors.  So simple and beautiful- yet encourages children to think about color in a new way and starts them on the path of realizing they can use more than the realistic or expected color when creating art.  The question is how can I get kinders to get that same look?

First, we tore our paper for snow.  I think hand torn paper gives a great look to a project and honestly for kindergarteners, it's great exercise for fine motor control.  We then used peeled crayons in the colors that Keats used in the snow- blues, pinks and purples- and used the side of the crayon to color the snow.  The white still shows through, but there is color there too.  I think this could be a good place for pastels too, but sometimes little ones get too heavy handed with those, and then there will be NO white left showing!  The white paper is then glued onto a blue rectangle, making sure to match corners.  The kids can then turn their paper either horizontally or vertically, depending on how steep they wanted their sledding hill to be.  Not surprisingly, most boys went for the steepest hill possible!!  They they glued on the body to look like it was sliding down the hill.  The bodies were precut shapes that looked like little Peter in his red snowsuit.  To personalize them, I took their pictures with the digital camera, cropped and sized them, and cut them to fit in the snowsuit, as though it was their face in there with their hood pulled up.  Lastly they decorated with punched snowflakes- again in all the colors that Keats used.

I think they turned out really sweet.  The kids needed encouragement to color dark enough with the crayon on the snow to see it, and to add lots of snowflakes, but they certainly had fun on their snowy, sledding adventures.  Happy Birthday, Peter!!

Creating the texture and color on the snow.                    Paper punched snowflakes.     

Weeeee!!!                                                      Some of our finished work.