The important Thing...

H and I are enjoying working on a little book for her. We are using Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book as a jumping off spot and patterning H's book after it. Brown's book has a different everyday object for each page and the text goes something like this:

The important thing about a spoon is that you eat with it.

It's like a little shovel,

You hold it in your hand,

You put it in your mouth,

It isn't flat,

It's hollow,

And it spoons things up.

But the important thing about a spoon is that you eat with it.

So H chose different subjects and we wrote about them: herb gardens, flowers, Easter dress, pillows... It is interesting what she thinks is "important" about each thing. Some match what I would have said, but often it is different. It is fun to have a little window into her brain.

She wants to illustrate each page and compile it into a book, so we'll be working on that for a bit I imagine. She has been into drawing fancy dresses of late too, so we illustrated that page first:

The important thing about an Easter dress is that it is fabric.

You can put it on.

It is pretty with ribbon on it and bell sleeves.

You can hunt Easter eggs in it.

But the important thing about and Easter dress is that it is fabric.

I thought the techniques in the Doodle Bug activity would work well for this one, so that's what we used. The background is all chalk pastel and the detail work is in watercolor pencils that were carefully retraced with a wet brush.