Don Freeman

Next Art project on our list: Corduroyby Don Freeman. Today we completed part II of the Eric Carle project, by having student cut shapes out of their texture-painted papers from yesterday and glue them onto a background paper to form a collage. Tomorrow, we will make our corduroy print bears! I have a big box of buttons, so that's no problem, and I have plenty of green construction paper for his overalls, but I ran into a snag when making the actual bear template. Finally, I found a nice graphic: a Corduroy bear template (from a Corduroy study guide for a children's theater program at UMass). The study guide includes a lot of ideas about drama, so if you wanted to have your students write a script for the Corduroy story, based on the picture book, and perform it, that might be a nice extension. My class did a playwriting workshop today, actually, so it fits well!

The bear image on page 7 takes up almost a full sheet of paper; to resize, open the pdf, right click on the image, hit Copy image, open a Word document, click Paste, then click on your image so the invisible box around it shows up, move your mouse arrow up to one of the top corners, and pull the corner of the box inward towards its center. This makes the image smaller while maintaining its proportions. It was more of a challenge than I expected to find corduroy fabric; it's easiest to hit the thrift store and get a piece of inexpensive clothing. MaryAnn suggests corrugated cardboard as an alternative but I found it difficult to uniformly rip off the paper outside of the cardboard box flap and expose the rippled inside. Also, I think the ripples would be too big in proportion to the bear template I plan to use. So we will try fabric. I am thinking that I will have the students paint the fabric with their paintbrushes and then lay their paper flat on top of the painted fabric, instead of trying to flip it and keep it from bending and sticking to itself while it is wet with paint. Some straight pins to pin the fabric template to a large kitchen sponge would probably be a good idea.