Warmer weather means that we take our learning outdoors! We love to take walks together around our neighborhood and check out all of the natural elements that surround our home. The new book Anywhere Artist gave us some inspiration to see the nature around us in a more creative way.

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Anywhere Artist was written and illustrated by Nikki Slade Robinson. The main character in this story uses the world around her to create beautiful works of art. Whether she is seeing art in the sky above her or creating art out of the natural elements around her, she shows the reader how to see beauty in everything they see. The text beautifully swirls across the pages, curling around the creative and vivid artwork. Readers may be inspired to look at the world around them a little differently.

Finding Beauty Everywhere

Walk Your World – After reading this book, take a walk around your community and see what artistic images you can find around you. Look at the clouds in the sky and the swirls in the tree bark. Bring a piece of paper and a crayon so you can do “rubbings” of fun patterns. Hold the paper up to tree bark or a brick wall and color it with the crayon until you see the pattern on the paper. You could fill a whole piece of paper with different colors and patterns. Gather materials on your walk to create your own natural artwork when you return home.

Finding Beauty in Small Things – Point out beauty in everything around you and encourage your kids to do the same. How many different colors can you find? What patterns do you see?  Look at the ripples that appear in a puddle when you jump into it. Stare at the clouds in the sky and find fun shapes together.

Make Your Own Artwork

Natural Artwork – Use your natural materials to create your own artwork. This has become one of my daughter’s favorite new activities. After each of our walks, she likes to play her “stick game” and create pictures using the items we have gathered. Sometimes these are as simple as shapes or letters. However, we have also branched out into other forms of artwork.

We decided to use some of the materials to recreate some of her favorite book characters. Since the dried grass she found resembled the scruffy fun on Mercer Mayer’s Little Critter, this was an easy one to start with. I used chalk to draw his head and face, while my daughter added his fur. She also thought it looked like the fur on Llama Llama (another current favorite series), so we drew him as well.

Practice letter recognition in nature!

Letters in Nature – My daughter loves finding familiar shapes, letters and numbers in the sticks, leaves and assorted items that she finds on our walks. Using the materials that we collected on our walk, I encouraged her to help me create letters, numbers and shapes out of the items we found. I even spelled out some of the words that she recognizes and had her spell them with me.

Nature as Art – Panting with a brush can be fun, but what about painting with a bunch of grass? Or a piece of bark? There are so many amazing materials that you can find around you that would create beautiful artwork. Using materials gathered on your walk, encourage kids to try using the items to paint. Some of them will not work well at all, but that is part of the fun. Encourage them to share what worked and what didn’t, and ask them why they think some materials worked better than others. You could also use some of your materials in place of paper or canvas. Leaves and rocks are great surfaces for painting and can create some fun projects.

How do you find beauty in the world around you? This book will inspire you to look at the world around you a bit differently and hopefully find a little beauty in the small things.

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