COLORES DE LA VIDA Mexican Folk Art Colors in Spanish and English

Hardcover: 32 pages

Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press (June 28, 2011)

ISBN-10: 1933693827

ISBN-13: 978-1933693828

Little kids love colors, they love animals, and they love the sounds of words. Especially new words. Colores de la Vida—the third in the highly successful series First Concepts in Mexican Folk Art—combines all these elements to teach early learners about color. Leggy red giraffes, pink cows, purple rabbits—the Oaxacan folk artists who contributed to this book unleashed their imaginations and went wild with color. Young children will delight in the bright colors of the Oaxacan rainbow while folk art collectors will marvel at the whimsical handcrafts.

But the simplicity of a book like Colores de la Vida belies the years of research and thoughtful intercultural communication with third-world artists done by Cynthia Weill. As an art historian, she has always been interested in the crafts of developing nations. Weill's intention with Colores de la Vida—and its predecessors in the series, ABeCedarios and Opuestos—has been to find an educational purpose for the work of Oaxacan artisans. She hopes to open up a larger, more international market for their craft.

The highly anticipated Colores de la Vida is available now from Cinco Puntos Press! 

Art lovers and early readers alike will swoon over the whimsical Oaxacan woodcarvings and vibrant colors, accompanied by words in Spanish and English. Stretching mama-and-baby giraffes in red, a creeping lizard in verde, shimmering goldfish for what else? Dorado! 

Cynthia Weill is a professor and mentor to teachers at Columbia University's Teachers College. She also owns a business—Aid to Women Artisans—that promotes the craftwork of artisans from developing countries. Colores de la Vida is her third book in the First Concepts in Mexican Folk Art series.

View great images in this PDF and see how Leoncito was created. 

Other books in the series 

Cynthia Weill’s book of Mexican folk art teaches kids about opposites in Spanish and English! These whimsical little animals from Oaxaca, carved and painted by hand, make learning about opposites fun. Up and down, tall and short, left and right—all inside a beautiful book.

Delicate hand-painted animals from Oaxaca lead little ones through a bilingual alphabet.

Every ABC book worth its cover price is bound to have bright colors and big letters. But not every ABC book has magical hand-carved animals to illustrate every letter. And very few alphabet books present those letters in more varieties than English! Very few alphabet books except the ABeCedarios, that is! In this brightly colored book, the alphabet is presented in both Spanish and English, and includes the four additional letters—and whimsical animals—that make the Spanish alphabet so much fun.