Painting the Beetles

Just wanting to share a little activity that Chobe and I did based on one of his books, Mother Earth and Her Children by Sybil von Offers.

 

I like this story a lot, and so does he.  It has simple illustrations based off of photographs of a quilt that tell a story.  It is translated from German though, so it reads a bit awkwardly at times.


One of his favorite lines from the story is, "Brushes and colors are set to go, to paint the beetles see how they glow."  He runs around quoting it all the time.  He went through a phase this spring always talking about "paint the beetles!" 

 

So I picked up some vaguely round beetle shaped rocks from the creek bed and drew a few beetles on paper so that he could paint the beetles.


He really liked painting the rocks.

But his interest was kind of waning by the time it came to paint the ones on paper.   So he asked me to paint them.  I got him to paint on one a little, but he insisted that I paint the other beetles.  This was pretty quick and easy to put together, and makes the story a bit less abstract...even if painting beetles isn't the most practical real life activity.  It's fun for pretending.  I think it's important to include both real life skills and do imaginative activities too.