I’ll admit that part of the appeal of doing this project with my daughters was the opportunity to shop for cute outfits, dress up, and take pictures. It’s soooo much fun!! I can’t escape the former school teacher in me though, and there had to be more meat to what we were doing. So, we’ve spent some time reading, creating, and exploring Frida Kahlo’s life and her artwork through various methods. This aspect feeds my need to research and plan. 🙂
To start, we already owned the children’s picture book ‘Frida’ and had read it, but visited it again. The artwork is stunning, but the story is told in a bit of a depressing light(hard to avoid with her life at times) that required some discussion. It does do a good job of presenting true and accurate information though. I then picked up ‘Frida Kahlo: The Artist Who Painted Herself.’ This book is told from the point of view of a young girl learning about Frida Kahlo for a school project. It includes photographs of Frida Kahlo and her artwork, so it makes a nice reference book for young children. A great digital resource that we found via Mommy Maestra(a terrific site for lesson planning for Frida Kahlo) is a fun iTunes app called Frida’s World. It is a very cute story about Frida that you can read to your children or you can choose to have it read to your child. It also includes some coloring pages from the story. We really enjoyed this app and the story is very positive and upbeat. Speaking of coloring, we found some coloring pages online(a favorite and free download found here), and purchased a coloring book as well, but I have yet to receive it. Finally, we worked on some paper dolls. I ordered a book on Amazon of paper dolls, but they were too pretty for me to cut up! I instead found some online that you can order and print instead. 🙂 I may end up trying to scan some pages of the book to print and cut if I find the time. 🙂
Once we knew about her story I wanted to look a little closer at her style. A lot of who Frida was, she portrayed through her choice in clothing, hairstyle and decor of her ‘Blue House.’ La Casa Azul, is Frida’s house in Mexico City, Mexico which is now maintained as a museum to Frida. Last year they opened a temporary exhibit of Frida’s dresses and costumes(see video on the exhibit here). It is a fabulous website with a sections for Children and teachers here, and visiting the actual museum has been on my bucket list for some time now! We had a lot of fun looking at the website and seeing how the clothes we picked for the pictures corresponded to Frida’s own style.
A Step in Her Shoes 