The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush Read Aloud & Stunning Art Activity
I absolutely love reading Tomie dePaola’s Legend of the Indian Paintbrush story around Thanksgiving! It’s a beautiful story and sets the stage for an awesome art project. Let’s chat more about this book and how we made a beautiful piece of art based on the book!
Why Read The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush?
Aside from the read aloud art project we did, we got a lot out of this book last week! I love using a single book over multiple days or even the entire week to take a deep dive! With one book we can cover vocabulary, retelling, fluency, comprehension deep dives, art or writing projects! Some can even lead into a non-fiction discussion for science or social studies!
We used this book over a whole week in November for learning about legends and their characteristics. One day, we looked for evidence in the text to show each of the characteristics of legends.
Another day, we reread the book and learned 6 new tier 2 vocabulary words using our Tier 2 slideshow and response sheet! Cooper loves learning new words and I love that we are learning them in a meaningful way!
Sunset Art Project
At the end of the week, we were reading to create our sunset pieces just like Little Gopher. Here are the materials we used to create our Legend of the Indian Paintbrush chalk art:
- white and black cardstock
- oil pastels
- kleenex
You could definitely use watercolors to paint like Little Gopher did in the book, but I chose pastels because it was a different medium we hadn’t used before and it went with my goals for learning about medium and technique!
We learned about the art terms, “medium” and “technique.” Our medium was pastels, and our technique we learned was blending.
First, we chose the colors of our sunset from the pastels. Then, we made stripes of each color with the pastels by dragging the long side of the pastel across the paper.
(I would suggest leaving LESS white space between the stripes. I ended up adding more color all the way to the edges.)
Then, we blended the colors together using a Kleenex.
After everything was blended like we wanted, we were ready to add the silhouettes! We used black cardstock for this part. First, we cut out a black hill landscape and glued it to the bottom. Then we added the tipis and details.
(Note: my cardstock was wider than my black paper so I trimmed it after I was completely finished to clean up the look!)
Cooper wanted to add Little Gopher in his piece. I think it turned out so great and it was SUPER easy!
