Day and Night Forests, p.s. there's glitter

This week we conducted a comparative study of these books...Baba Yaga and the Wise Doll adapted by Oran Hiawyn and illustrated by Ruth Brown (love, love her illustrations and the Leaves LOVE her book, Toad), Babushka Baba Yaga by Patricia Polacco (I am, personally, not a fan of this book, but that is the adult-me talking), and we are now in the middle of Anna and The Seven Swans but Maida Silverman. We read the Wise Doll on Monday because it set up the project for the day perfectly. The children have been working on day and night paintings and last week they collaged trees onto their night backgrounds. These books show three versions of "forest" and the children are creating their own story illustrations. 

The children are adding watercolor paint on top (and beside) the tempera paint.  

We talked about how if the trees are close together or are leaning, the forest appears scarier to a small child (we will revisit this again when we work on the stories next week). Merrick's trees grow so close together that you can only see a hint of the full moon behind them. The trees are also dark in grays, black, and purple. On Monday, they will collage the trees onto their day sky. In case you are wondering why these projects are spaced just so, it is because the backgrounds are layered tempera and watercolor. When a glue wash is applied to these (especially the watercolor) the paint AND the paper used for the trees will bleed. Since each sky and trees feature different shades, the glue and the glue brushes would carry those colors with them and by the time the last children began their projects, their colors would no longer be their own.

Oh and p.s. there has to be glitter.