Book Inspired Painting

Today I want to share a wonderful library find! We have renewed this book, because we have been enjoying it so much. The book is Stars Beneath Your Bed: The Surprising Story of Dust by April Pulley Sayre. Now I have to admit I learned a lot from reading this book, so I do consider it educational as well as interesting.

The story begins with sunrise and discussing the colors in the sky. The story than discusses dust and what it is and where it comes from. It goes through the day explaining the different places dust comes from and how it never goes away so the dust we see could be from the dinosaurs or King Tut. Another wonderful connection is that it describes dust from various places like the African savannah (connection: Kenya), meerkats, ocean, Egypt with pyramids (next month's place on our trip Around the World in 12 Dishes) and finally space. The book ends with how the dust will scatter the light for the sunset and then create the colors of the sunrise tomorrow. At the end of the book is the explanation of what dust really is and where it comes from as well as how it makes the sunset.

Dry Paper

To go along with this book, I thought it would be fun to paint some sunset and sunrise paintings. I bought Hazel a water color set so we pulled it out and tried it. She had a blast. I made two of the papers wet so we could do wet-on-wet painting and left two dry.

Dry Paper

The best part of this activity was she had so much fun mixing colors and making new shades. I only gave her six colors to work with: yellow, brown, red, green, blue and white.

Wet Paper

I loved how the wet-on-wet came out. Hazel asked me to help her with these.

Ok, they did not come out looking like sunsets or sunrises, but we had fun.