On the blog and in our homeschool, I’ve been focused on Native Americans for the last month. I introduced the Plain Indians to my children and did this beautiful art project inspired by a Native American legend.
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After introducing Native Americans in the previous lesson, we read The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush which is a really beautiful story about Little Gopher, a child artist. He receives a vision to paint with the colors of the sunset but can’t find the right colors.
He eventually finds brushes of brilliant colors planted on a hill which then become the brilliantly colored flowers referred to as Indian Paintbrush after he paints his sunset.
After reading the story, we painted sunsets with liquid watercolor paint starting with blue at the top followed by purple, red, orange, and yellow.
A really cool variation of this lesson would be to paint with actual flowers! It would take some experimentation with the type of flowers and the types of paint, but it would be fun to try!
After we painted the sunsets, we let them dry and came back on a different day to add a silhouette of a hill and teepees as they lived in teepees in the book.
Overall, it was a fun, easy project with a great cultural connection!
Amazing! Thank you for sharing! I really don’t have any problem with sometimes giving kids ‘instruction’ as ‘how’ to do it..they’ll still find their own way in between I think..
You’re welcome!