Joseph Had a Little Overcoat Book & Craft

The first time I looked through the book Joseph Had a Little Overcoat by Simms Taback, I knew I wanted to do a craft project based on the illustrations.

If you’ve never read the book, you should. It’s a delightful book about a man who keeps turning his overcoat into something new, until it gets too tiny to transform anymore.

The book uses die-cut pages to show the transformation of the coat.

Well, die-cut is a bit too complicated for preschoolers and toddlers to tackle, so I thought and thought about what we could do. As I was flipping through the book, I landed on the inside cover and voila!

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We were going to make a collage!

Supplies Used:
Black construction paper (background)
Various colors of card stock and scrapbooking paper (any sort of paper would work)
Scissors
Marker
Glue

We started working on cutting our paper and card stock. I have a supply of fun scissors, so I got those out.

We cut and cut.

I also got out the markers so we could draw patterns on our paper. I don’t have a lot of patterned paper, but I didn’t let that stop us. It’s easy and more fun to draw your own patterns.

We had fun and worked hard, as you can tell by our wonderfully messy table.

My goal was to step back and let the girls do as they please. I didn’t want to try and control the project. Of course, that meant I had to do my own!

Here are our finished projects:

Lizzie, age 4, had a lot of fun making patterns!

AJ, age 2, cut for a while. Then she had me cut. She glued a few pieces down, which she pulled up again so she could draw on them with the markers. She ended up with a pile of paper scraps and one slightly used piece of black construction paper. I loved watching this process!

Oh, and here’s mine. Just in case you were curious…

Have you read any good books lately?