Welcome to stART! I hope that you will enjoy our story and art project and maybe even share your own too. All I ask is that you link back to A Mommy’s Adventures somewhere in your post by either adding my button or a text link, so that others can see all the other great projects that everyone shares too! The linky will be open all week. Be sure to stop by and visit the different links…every week there are so many different and fun book and craft ideas!
Check out the stART tab in my navigation bar where you can find our past stART projects. All the books that we have read and did a stART project for are listed in alphabetical order.
This week the weather has been BEAUTIFUL and we have been busy tending to our garden and planting some more seeds. I found To Be Like the Sun, by Susan Marie Swanson at the library and knew it would be perfect for when we planted our sunflower seeds. I love that this book tells about the lifecycle of a Sunflower Seed written in a lyrical free verse. The illustrations gave us so much to talk about and after reading this book we were ready to plant our own Sunflower seeds and make our sunflower paintings too!
For our Sunflower Painting we used empty plastic Snapple bottles. The bottoms were perfect for making a flower print. Both Emily and Juliette were able to dip the bottom of the bottle into the thin layer of paint and make the prints on the paper. Emily went over each one to make a fuller flower.
Next, the girls used a pencil eraser dipped in brown paint to add the sunflower seeds to the middle of their flowers . 
Finally once the paint was dry Emily used a marker to make the stems and leaves for her flowers.
Juliette’s Sunflowers
Emily’s Sunflowers
I cut out a pair out of craft foam and Emily set to work coloring them with markers and decorate them with sequins and spangles.
, by James Preller. In this book a bear is so tired and just wants to sleep (hibernate) all winter, but his friend mouse wants him to stay up and play. He tries to convince him to stay up by telling him all the great things that you can do in the winter. Bear says that he will not miss any of those winter things, but will miss his friend. He tells him to wake him up in Spring when the flowers bloom. After reading this cute story, we talked about all the fun things that we did in the winter (built snowmen, had hot chocolate) and then we talked about all the fun things we do in the Spring. Emily loves the flowers so we made special flower pictures to go along with this book.
When I was over my grandmother’s house I noticed this really old pack of mini baking cups and she said that I could take them. I knew they would be perfect for a project and we put them to use right away…to make Spring Flowers!
I gave Emily all of the supplies and we each worked on our own flowers. After watching what I did she made her own. It was so much fun to create together. I love seeing how she tries to make more realistic pictures all on her own. 
