I've been looking forward to doing a study of Eric Carle for a while and was just waiting for the right lesson to come to me. I have a huge roll of window cling that I got from the recycle center and have used on several occasions. This seemed like a fun and new way to use it.
For the Preschool and Pre-K classes, I offered them a variety of images from books illustrated by Carle. I placed the image under a piece of clear window cling. The children used activity paint to paint on top of the image. (I found that tempera paint does not work on the plastic. When it dries, it flakes off. Activity and finger paint work best.) Some took the image literally and painted what they saw while others used the image as an inspiration and created their own beautiful art. As this was an open ended project, there was very little direction given on what they were to do. I was interested to see what they would come up with.
When the pictures dried, we hung them in the art studio and in the classroom windows. They make beautiful window art pieces. They are all unique and super colorful!
I also did this project with the toddlers which ended up being an abstract project but very fun nonetheless. The toddlers enjoyed painting on a new surface and color mixing as they went.
