Preschool Picasso: Dr. Seuss

This month's Preschool Picasso went very well thanks to Dr. Seuss! I had the biggest turnout I ever had for this program and it was a complete success. 

Because this was our Dr. Seuss theme, I was excited to choose the perfect Dr. Seuss book to read to this group. Since they are older, I read The Cat in the Hat. It is always so fun to read this book and it was Dr. Seuss magic because the kids were listening so well to the story and were genuinely interested to hear it. 

After we read about The Cat in the Hat's mischief, I explained our two crafts for the day. 

Our first craft was making Thing 1from the story. I explained that we had Thing 1 on our paper, but he was missing his blue hair and his red shirt. They had to paint his red shirt on and have some fun making his blue hair. For his hair, they had to use a dropper and fill it with some diluted blue paint and then drop little dots onto the top of their paper. Once they were done experimenting with the droppers, they used a straw to blow the paint around and make his crazy hair. Both the kids and parents loved this part of the craft. Once our paint was dry, we added a Thing 1 name tag to our project.

Our other craft was making a truffula tree from Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. There are so many different ideas available to make truffula trees, but I went with the one that I think would be the most interesting and allowed the most practice with motor skills. I cut out sponge squares and put out forks and different colored neon paint. We used the sponge squares to make the trunks with yellow and black (or whatever color each child wanted to use) and then the forks were used to make the top of the tree but pressing our forks in paint and then onto our paper. The parents liked how this craft allowed their kids to pick their paint colors and experiment with colors, patterns, and prints.  

This is definitely a theme I would want to do again and Preschool Picasso and Toddler Art lets me get a bit more creative with Dr. Seuss as opposed to a standard program where I most likely wouldn't use paint, but some other art format. 

We'll be doing some easier, but similar Dr. Seuss crafts in next week's Toddler Art.