Happy Birthday, Eric Carle!

Currier Memorial School is happy to announce that we are hosting a school-wide Eric Carle Festival. Our celebration honors the life and work of the beloved children's author and illustrator, Eric Carle. Eric Carle celebrates his 80th birthday this year. He has illustrated more than seventy picture books for young children and is most well known for his kindergarten classic, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" celebrates it's 40th anniversary this year. Eric Carle's books are enormously popular with parents and children. His books have been translated into 29 languages and sold more than 88 million copies around the world.

Our students began the celebration by looking at our library collection of Eric Carle books. They tried to determine how Eric Carle created his illustrations. Then we watched the video "Eric Carle, Picture Maker". In the video, Eric Carle invites students into his studio where he demonstrates how he created the illustrations for "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". Students watched as he demonstrated his technique for decorating tissue papers and using his handmade papers to create a collage.

With grant funding from the Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, Vermont, we were able to purchase the supplies needed for our entire school to create artwork based on Eric Carle's techinque of creating hand decorated papers. On Thursday, Dec 3rd the painting began. For the next three weeks we will meet in the muti-purpose room to sponge, splatter, roller, scrape, and stamp. We are creating a "bank" of beautifully colored papers. We will be using these papers in the coming months for collage, paper sculpture and mobiles.

I can't wait to post the results. This is such a fun project and we are thankful for school wide support and the grant funding that made it possible.

You can learn more about Eric Carle by visiting here: http://www.eric-carle.com/home.html. Be sure to click on the Photos and Videos link on his home page to watch Eric Carle work on "Mister Seahorse" or to see how he created really big papers for his mural at the Eric Carle Museum.

Happy Birthday, Eric Carle!