stART-The Legend of the Poinsettia-by Tomie dePaola

We love all of Tomie dePaola's books, but I have a special fondness for his Christmas legends and saint legends books. The Legend of the Poinsettia is the book we unwrapped yesterday and I had a plan to make a handprint poinsettia when we opened this wonderful book.
"Tomie dePaola presents the story of a well-intentioned Mexican child, Lucida. Distressed because she has no other gift to offer Baby Jesus, she carries into the church an armful of weeds, each of which suddenly becomes "tipped with a flaming red star"-marking the miraculous blooming of the first poinsettias." Amazon review

The first step in these very easy poinsettias was to paint a paperplate green.
We did this the night before the next step so the paint had time to dry.
The next day we made 5 handprints for the poinsettia flowers.
We learned in the book that the people in Mexico call these flowers: la Flor de Nochebuena---which means, the Flower of the Holy Night. We talked about how they look like stars.

You can't have more fun than this during art time.

Kimmy, as always, is a little more lady like in her artwork.

After the blossoms were dry, we used a q-tip to dot yellow paint onto the center of our flowers.

Very careful, now Kimberly!

Very pretty results!!

Check out other stART posts over here at A Mommy's Adventure.