A fun book to read with my first and second graders is Little Mouse's Painting by Diane Wolkstein. This book has beautiful artwork with an even better story. Little Mouse loves spending time with his friends but on this day he wanted to go out on his own. Little Mouse decides he wants to paint a beautiful landscape. Each of mouse's friends stumbles upon Little Mouse and when they see his painting, they each see themselves in the painting even though Little Mouse was persistent that it was just a landscape. During the reading of this book I talked with the students on perspective. We took a brief walk outside to look at the clouds. I asked the kids what objects they saw in the cloud. Several were looking at the same cloud but saw different pictures, just like Little Mouse's friends! When we came back in, I gave each student a squiggly like and asked them to turn that into something. I got everything from mustaches, to roller coasters, to a snake lying in the grass. Everyone had a different idea of what that line was. Not one person was right, not one person was wrong- just different.
During this lesson we also talked about optical illusions and how it makes our eyes see things differently. The kids had fun making their own optical illusions.
For homework that night, the students were given a bag of circles of all different colors. Some were whole circles, some were half, quarter and so on. They were to use these pieces to create their own picture. We used the books below for examples.
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