Nature In Your Nurture

Books

🌿Georgia’s Bones by Jen Bryant
This book details a young Georgia O’Keefe’s interest in the natural world and a visit to the desert where she became enamored with the beauty of animal bones and skulls, which came home with her to be depicted in her artwork.

🌿Outside Art by Madeline Kloepper
A marten peeks into the home of an artist who is making… something. The animals outside gather, arguing over what art is, what it means, and why humans do it. Though, they never reach a consensus, we then see examples of the ways animals make sounds, markings, or structures that have different meanings to them–or no meaning at all.

🌿Nature is an Artist by Jennifer Lavallee
This vibrantly-illustrated book explores the artistic creations of Nature personified, filling the world with beauty in brilliant arrays of light, color, and sculpture.

The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds
Vashti tries to explain to her teacher that she cannot draw. Her teacher encourages her to make just one mark on a paper and sign her name to it, which Vashti does. When she later finds her plain dot framed on the wall, Vashti feels certain she can improve upon her work and sets about making better dots– lots of dots! As she produces more and more art, her artwork becomes more and more impressive.

Viva Frida by Yuyi Morales
This Caldecott Honor book is illustrated using photos of hand-made puppets of a young Frida Kahlo with her pet monkey, a fawn, and her husband Diego Rivera. I love that an additional dream sequence is illustrated in a two-dimensional medium. This book is less about Frida Kahlo as a historical figure and more an illustration of the process and purpose of creating art as a celebration of life.

🌿🌻Fairy Friends: Colors by Merrilee Liddiard
This colors primer features mixed media illustrations of fairies with simple text introducing the audience to a full spectrum of colors–and color names–from nature. The high-contrast pictures are brilliantly engaging for young infants beginning to notice the world around them!

🌿🌻Peekaboo Haiku by Danna Smith and Teagan White
This lift-the-flap board book features haiku about wilderness scenes through the seasons. The illustrations are lovely, and most of the animals shown are native to the US.

🌻Clive and His Art by Jessica Spanyol
In this board book, a child named Clive explores art through different mediums, including sponge prints, crayons, a box castle, & leaf prints in the sun. He visits an art museum and reads books about art. I also love that the illustrations depict Clive using sparkles in his work and creating artwork for a friend–things boys are too often redirected away from.

🌻Art for Baby curate by Yana Peel
This large and durable board book introduces the audience to high-contrast black & white artwork from ten different artists.

🌻Artsy Cats by Mudpuppy, illustrated by Angie Rozelaar
This board book is equal parts serious and tongue-in-cheek parody. Cats are depicted in the styles of the represented modern artists, usually imitating a specific work. The name of each artist is slightly altered in the cat theme (eg. Frida “Catlo’, Yayoi “Katsama”). The birth and death years of the artist are presented unaltered (See? A serious book).

🌻Mini Masters Series by Julie Merberg & Suzanne Bober
In the Garden with Van Gogh
Sunday with Seurat
Painting with Picasso
A Picnic with Monet
Quiet Time with Cassat
Dancing with Degas
Sharing with Renoir
Dreaming with Rousseau
On an Island with Gaughin
A Magical Day with Matisse

🌻This is Music: Strings, This is Music: Horns, & This is Music: Drums
These illustrated board book explores different types of horns, percussion, and stringed instruments around the world, including guitar, sita, banjo, liuquin, harp, piano, and ukelele. Near the end of the books are interactive pages where readers are invited to strum an elastic band, blow through a cutout hole, or pat a drum. Keeping things simple, they have 2-4 sentences per page spread.

I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More by Karen Beaumont
Following the tune “If It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More,” an artistic child banned from painting for painting too much of the house cannot resist using himself as a canvas instead, coloring each part of his body with colors and patterns. This delightful and musical book is an asset to the strong of heart who aren’t afraid to inspire a bit of color on their kids.

Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building by Christy Hale
This book shows illustrations of children building things like block towers, sand castles, lego cities, and pillow forts, and then juxtapositions them next to photos of real-world architecture that resemble those styles. The texts describe the feelings, thoughts, and sensations children might experience while building. I think it’s all fabulous and I’d love to use this book again.

Museum ABCs by The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This is a basic alphabet book illustrated with four samples of artwork for each letter (eg. “B is for Boat” with four different paintings of boats. There is an index at the back of the book identifying the title and artist of each work. I’m rarely impressed by ABC books, but this one is still pretty okay.

Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh
When three white mice find three jars of red, yellow, and blue paint, they dip themselves in and start experimenting with color mixing and make new discoveries. A cute story exploring primary and secondary colors.

Mr. Matisse and His Cutouts by Annemarie van Haeringen
This illustrated book tells the story of famous artist Henri Matisse being bed-ridden and relying on others to bring him materials with which he could continue to produce collage art. History seems to indicate that his cutout work actually preceded his loss of mobility, but I think the story does adequately capture his movement away from more traditional styles into the art form characteristic of his later life.

Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by Javaka Steptoe
This illustrated biography was a winner of The Caldecott Medal and a Coretta Scott King Award.

The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins by Barbara Kerley
In 1853, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins built 33 life-sized dinosaur sculptures for the Crystal Palace in a London Park, commissioned by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Although we know enough about dinosaurs now to recognize the many inaccuracies of these sculptures, the book neatly describes the breaking scientific insights that informed Waterhouse’s depictions at that time and the impact the sculptures had on education and public awareness about dinosaurs. Notably, the book goes on to talk about Waterhouse’s woes working in America where his new sculptures were destroyed and buried in Central Park.
Note: The book attributes the vandalism and thwarted endeavors to politician “Boss” Tweed, but in summer of 2023 documents were uncovered that revealed the culprit to be Central Park Treasurer and VP Henry Hilton. The book is still excellent and the story can be modified on reading, but as it’s already a reasonably long book, it’s often suited my purposes to simply end the story with the success of the Crystal Palace exhibition.

The Elements of Art by Maren Daniels
This short and colorful book features a variety of different illustrations side by side as the elements of art (line, form, color, value, space, texture, etc.) are defined and exemplified. The book is written by a Minneapolis art teacher

Do You See What I See? by Helen Borten
This book explains lines, shapes, and colors through simple illustrations and detailed imaginative descriptions. All of the pages in this book are printed with blue and black ink, many with red and yellow, and some with green. This book was originally printed in 1959 when children’s picture books were usually printed with limited colors (the same may be noted in contemporaneous books like The Cat in the Hat or Goodnight Moon).

Masterpiece Mix by Roxie Munro
In this story, an artist describes different genres of painting as she contemplates the possibilities of her blank canvas. With the simple descriptions are samples of famous paintings. At the back of the book there is also a key with the titles and histories of the sampled artwork with facts about the artists’ lives.

I Have an Idea by Herve Tullet
This is book explores the abstract concept of having an idea, attempting to describe and illustrate the process of creativity from waiting or searching for inspiration to pinning down one thought from many. Because the concepts are quite abstract, I would recommend this book for children over 4.

ROAR-chestra!: A Wild Story of Musical Words by Robert Heidbreder
This illustrated book uses an orchestra of animals to very creatively expresses the senses we get from musical directions like pianissimo, forte, and staccato.

Little Rosetta and the Talking Guitar by Charnelle Pinkney Barlow
This illustrated book tells the story of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an African-American child whose new and different way of playing the guitar would one day earn her a place in music history as the “godmother” of rock and roll. In the book, Rosetta is part of a musical church community and the sounds of her “talking” guitar are influenced by the everyday voices and noises of life around her.

Music is Everywhere by Maya Anjmera
This photo-illustrated nonfiction book explores music around the world, including instruments, voice, and movement. Simple text is accompanied by photo captions sharing additional information.

Little People, Big Dreams series by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara

Creative Art Opportunities

❤️Shapes collage
🧡Painting under the table
💛Oil pastels or chalk on black paper
💚Bold brush paintings with bright colors (fauvism)
💙Liquid watercolor paints (jello mix or food coloring)
💜Use acrylic paints on canvas

Hands On Experiences

⛅️Musical instruments, primarily wood
⛅️Explore a stringed instrument (I use an old viola
⛅️Roll, jump, and somersault freely to musi
⛅️Freestyle dancing to music
⛅️Dancing with scarves or ribbon wands
🌿Use sidewalk chalk to create designs on pavement
🌿Use stones or wood pieces to create designs in the grass
🌿❄️Use watercolors in a spray bottle to create designs in snow

Music

For this unit, I simply put together a playlist of music I personally find deeply moving or energizing. For me that included various classical compositions with some symphonic metal, indie-folk, rock, and techno.

Our favorites for “running and jumping were the “Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld” and “Russian Dance” from “The Nutcracker Suite”.

For moving our arms and twirling our bodies in space, we loved Lindsey Stirling’s interpretation “The Sugar Plum Fairy,” Stirling’s “something Wild,” the instrumental “Spectre” by Alan Walker, and movements Summer III and Winter I from Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” concertos.

NIYN – Art on Spotify
All playlists are works in progress and are actively curated when I have a unit in play or preparation, so new songs may appear and old songs may be removed if they don’t suit my designs.