My Heart is Like a Zoo

This summer, my mom found me the kids a great book - My Heart is Like a Zoo by Michael Hall. Every animal mentioned in the book are created using only hearts, what a great book for Valentine's Day. The illustrations were just screaming for an art project.  We have started a mini art class with another home schooling family here and even though I had planned this week to start a new artist, my plans changed. We began working on some heart day projects. We read the book and discussed the pictures. We counted the hearts for each animal. Then we began to create.

J was truly inspired by the pictures and decided to create the hardest animal first. This is her coyote which she wanted to be all different colors.

Then she made a seal completely of hearts.

A bunny...

a bluebird....

and a frog.  They all turned out pretty cute.

This is a moose that I challenged my older daughter to create using only scraps of paper from our scrap paper. She was watching the other kids and wanted to make one as well.

What I learned from this project - I found some free printable heart templates of different sizes to use for this project from Loreen Leedy. There are 7 different sizes and they worked well for the project BUT they are half of a heart. This means the child had to put the half of heart on the fold then trace and cut. This was some what difficult and we wasted more paper than I wanted. If working this with the younger kids, I would make full heart templates for them to trace. Also, I would limit the child's choices of which animals they can create, especially if you are working with more than one child. The kids that I was working with wanted to do the coyote which caused some frustration - it is one of the more detailed animals in the book. Start out with simple animals. Lastly, if working with more than one child, photo copy the approved animals for the choices. This will eliminate having each child who want different animals from trying to share the book (and keep having to turn the pages). Hope this helps.

Links

Loreen Leedy has the free printable heart templates that we use.

Activity Village has several free printable heart shaped templates to use.

Spoonful has another printable heart template.

Raising Creative and Curious Kids has a video link for a cute guessing book - Valentine's Mystery Critters.

Worldsapart my pinterest board that has several links and ideas to go along with the book.