The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse

Three Year Old's Polka-Dotted Elephant

Oh my!  I think I have a new favorite book!  My son of course loves the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? and for some reason the blue horse is his absolute favorite animal in the book!  Well, when I saw The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse by Eric Carle I had to check it out from the library and read it to my son right away.

My three year old loved it.  He started reading it with me after the first three pages.  There is something so appealing about the simplicity of the words and the pictures that go along with them.  The artist (a young boy) in the book paints animals, but makes sure they are all colors that we don't associate with that animal. The rabbit is pink, the crocodile is red, and my favorite is the green lion!  By the end of the book the artist paints a polka-dotted donkey!

There is also a nice history in the back of the book about the artist, Franz Marc, whose paintings inspired a young Eric Carle.  I had no idea that Eric Carle grew up in Germany around the time of World War II!  It was fun to learn a little bit about my three year old's favorite author!  He even has a blog!  Check out his website here.

My son enjoyed making the animals from My Heart is Like a Zoo so much that I decided to let him make his own animal from The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse.  My son likes elephants so I found an elephant image that I thought would be easy to paint and printed it out for him.  I told him we were going to make our own polka-dotted elephant like the polka-dotted donkey in the book.

We painted polka dots with pencil erasers.  Each color had it's own pencil.  I used the pencils that don't sharpen well since I try to stay away from writing with those!

After we made the elephant, my three year old wanted to keep painting.  He painted for another 30 minutes while I made dinner!  We got most of our pictures from ABCTeach.com.

 While we painted we listened to the song "Red Bananas" by Ralph's World.  It seemed appropriate to listen to a song about a green gorilla while painting polka-dotted animals!

Overall, this craft was a HUGE success.  My three year old went to bed reading The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse and named all of the animals that he wanted to make again in the morning.  Now that everyone is asleep, I am off to go buy the book.  This is certainly a must have for our library!