Why Use Storybooks

As an art teacher, I love using teaching art activities by using children’s storybooks! Storybooks can bridge connections to the elements and principles of design within illustrations, pictures, or descriptive words. Storybooks can help you communicate, especially in art language.

In addition, book illustrations give visual clues to what color or shape looks like in the context of artworks. Storybooks don’t just have to be related to art topics or artists; you can use basic, classic children’s literature, such as The Giving Tree, The Ugly Duckling, Green Eggs and Ham, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Though, remember that almost all children’s storybooks are illustrated by an artist.

However, there are many other great reasons you should integrate books into art-making lessons. Using children’s storybooks can not only inspire creative ideas, but it can also bring characters and plots to life by following up with art activities.

Combining Storybooks and Art

Combining children’s storybooks and art supports:

• Developing early literacy
• Bringing characters and plots to life
• Engaging in open-ended questions
• Fostering multi-sensory learning
• Enriching reading and writing techniques

Developing Early Literacy

Children can learn art language by reading stories and following up with art activities. This can be a great way for you to enrich your teaching techniques by getting children to read more. Educational research confirms that when children read regularly, they expand their vocabularies, which leads to more reading and doing better academically in the upper grades. 

I regularly use this method when introducing new techniques to my students. I love theming art activities with stories! 

Bringing Characters and Plots to Life

Books bring characters and plots to life, but following up by creating your own character from a book is an immersive experience! You can appeal to young readers’ imagination by transforming a flat 2D character into physical pieces of art. Also, you can read a wonderful story like The Velveteen Rabbit and have them create their own rabbit character they can play with. And in addition, you can ask children to create art with an unexpected twist to the story or their own version of how the story ends. Allow them to paint a different image and draw their own scenes. Children love imagining themselves within stories.

Engaging in Open-Ended Questions

I usually read-aloud stories and point out art elements like colors and shapes. It’s a natural way I teach art language. I can prompt students with questions like “What colors do you see in this picture?” “Can you see lines used in the artwork?” “Can you describe what you see on this page?” “Look how interesting these shapes are.” “What shapes do you see?” “What are your favorite colors used in this art?” “Do you see the small dots?” “Would you like to go to the art shelf and experiment making some of these wavy lines with crayons?”

Fostering Multi-Sensory Learning

Reading to children is positive, but making the experience tactile is even better for cognitive processing. You can give children a different dimension to learning than just audio or visual senses by adding tactile sensory learning to deepen their understanding. Making art is a tactile, multi-sensory experience. For example, let’s say you read to a child a story about a duck; you can give the child an opportunity to create a three-dimensional duck out of clay by sparking lots of questions about the duck’s features, such as its size, color, and shape, further deepening their understanding about the characters or topics in the story. Another example could be looking at rainbows in illustrations. The conversations can go deeper by painting and mixing colors leading to scientific inquiries. Connecting storybooks and art activities is a multi-sensory experience for better comprehension.

Enriches Reading and Writing Techniques

Integrating art with reading and writing work can be exciting for students. Over the past ten years, I have visited many elementary grades as a special guest art teacher. As a result, I’ve had amazing opportunities to team up with other teachers to teach the Great Lessons.

Most of the lessons usually started with me coming into the classroom to teach an art technique, followed by the classroom’s teacher reading about the topic, and finally ending with the students following up with writing exercises related to the artwork they created in my session.

These teachers all reported back to me how their students were super engaged with reading and writing follow-up work because of their art lesson connection to the stories. They also reported to me that writing improved with some of their struggling students. In addition, they felt that the children were more invested in the outcome of how their artwork was reflected and open to writing critiques. 

My favorite Children’s Art Storybooks

Below are three videos where I read stories that can inspire and engage young children in both literacy and their interest in creating art through the Montessori art methods.

The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds, illustrator of the Judy Moody, Narrated by Art Teacher Spramani Elaun

Henri’s Scissors, by Jeanette Winter, Narrated by Art Teacher Spramani Elaun

Lines that Wiggle by Candace Whitman (Author), Steve Wilson (Illustrator), Narrated by Art Teacher Spramani Elaun

How-to teach children age appropriate art activities