Rooster's Off to See the World and Watercolors

We just started our new unit with the big question, "Where will our adventures take us?" Our first story in this unit was Eric Carle's "Rooster's Off to See the World." Watch a reading here on youtube.

We discussed Rooster's adventures as well as what kind of adventures we could take, both fictional and nonfictional. Students came up with potential adventures to many places including the Arctic and Banana Land. 

Being an art school, we also studied Eric Carle's techniques as an illustrator. We learned he uses a style of collage with hand-painted tissue papers. Click here to see Eric Carle's illustrating technique from the official Eric Carle site.

We observed, analyzed, compared, and contrasted illustrations from this story as well as some of his other stories we have read that he illustrated (The Tiny Seed, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, etc.) We decided to create our own images from the story using water colors on
paper.

I can't wait to teach the next Eric Carle lesson and allow the students to use the tissue paper collage technique. I will update on their creativity soon!