Madeline

We finally made it to the Madeline at 75: The Artwork of Ludwig Bemelmans exhibit at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. I have been meaning to go since December, but we made it the week before the show was going to close. While we were there we got to meet Madeline, see lots of large-scale paintings of Bemelmans work, attend a dance performance of Madeline by a local prep school, and do some artwork of our own. We had a lot of fun, and so, we had to re-row Madeline.
 

Here's a flashback to our first time through Madeline when Ella, my oldest, was in kindergarten. We loved making Madeline hats out of paper plates and bowls, so we had to do it again.
  
Here are our hats this time. We heated up our trusty glue guns. I traced around the paper bowl onto the plate and then cut a hole in the center of the plate. Then we glued a paper bowl to each paper plate.The kids then painted the hats: yellow for Madeline and black for Pepito, the son of the Spanish ambassador next door. Since we had no ribbon, we made the black bands and ribbons out of electrical tape. We glued two pom-poms to Pepito's hat. My two-year-old kept cracking us up all week by saying, "I have a hat like Potato!" 

 

Then we had a Madeline tea party with madeleine cakes, clementines, and French tea. We had the party on Mardi Gras so we could enjoy lots of treats before Lent. 

By the end of the week, the kids all had the book memorized, so they could recite it while I turned the pictures. We learned about symmetry in art and the kids used a tutorial of How to Draw Madeline that we picked up at the museum. For science, we learned about the internal parts of the human body: skeleton, muscles, and organs. We read a Magic Schoolbus book about the body and did a giant human body puzzle from The Evan Moor Giant Science Resource book. We also read Madeline in London, Madeline and the Bad Hat, and Madeline Says Merci, and watched several episodes of the Madeline cartoon.


If you like Madeline, you might also enjoy these other books set in France:
Anatole by Eve Titus
Minette's Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and her cat by Susanna Reich
Charlotte in Giverny by Joan MacPhail Knight
The Family Under the Bridge by Natalie Savage Carlson