Mouse Shapes by Ellen Stoll Walsh

Mouse Shapes by Ellen Stoll Walsh

Rating: 5 stars

And to wrap up our shape-a-thon, we'll be going to the Pentagon tomorrow morning.

Just kidding!  Maybe next year...

Of all the books that we've read this is definitely at the top.  Walsh of Mouse Paint fame provides a great little story about mice playing with shapes.  In this one the mice have names: Violet, Martin, and Fred.  They play with shapes, defining them (helpfully explaining that a lot of triangles are tricky, "but any shape with three sides is a triangle."  Then they start to make things with the shapes--first a simple house and tree, then the cat who is chasing them.  And then, to scare that cat away, they make three scary versions of themselves.  It's simple and cute and incredibly easy to do a fun and, for us, wonderfully time-consuming art project afterward.


In the picture is Lorelei with her art--it's New York City, which cracks me up because she's never been to New York City.  Another example of how sponge-like these little brains around me are...did I mention it to her weeks ago?  Yesterday?  Who knows!  But we had a fun conversation about skylines, what they are and how architects take them into account when they erect a new building in a city.  

I'm sure that they have these kits somewhere in our local art supply store... "these kits" meaning a bunch of shapes that kids can punch out themselves.  But around here we do it the old-fashioned way--I actually cut pieces of paper in random shapes and then hand it over to the kids.  The funny twist here at our house today was that we are out of glue.  Completely (thanks to SOMEBODY (BEN!) never putting the cap back on and therefore the glue dries up).  So for almost an hour we heard, "May I please have another piece of tape?" about 60 gazillion times.  Another opportunity to sharpen our manners, so...