All About Cows

THE COW JUMPED OVER THE MOON

	Linda Alchin’s The Secret History of Nursery Rhymes (Neilson, 2013) discusses the historical backgrounds of many classical nursery rhymes, among them “Hey Diddle Diddle,” featuring cat, fiddle, and moon-jumping cow.
	BellaOnline’s Hey Diddle Diddle is a short history of the poem. It’s really about a love triangle and the Cow just might have been Queen Elizabeth I.
	P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006) includes the story of “The Dancing Cow” who has a star stuck on one horn from her famous jump over the moon.
	A space probe named Cow? (There was one. Well, almost.) Read all about the moon-circling space probe designed in 1957 by Krafft Ehricke and George Gamow in The Cow Jumped Over the Moon.

ART AND COWS

	In David Milgrim’s rhyming Cows Can’t Fly (Viking Juvenile, 1998), an imaginative little boy draws a picture of orange cows in a blue sky – and suddenly cows take to the air.  The problem: none of the flying-cow-resistant adults will look up. (“Ms. Crumb said cows/were far too fat/that facts were facts/and that was that.”) For ages 3-8.
	Want a flying cow of your own? From Playmaker Toys, this Flying Cow, launched via elastic slingshot, makes a mooing sound as it shoots through the air.
	Nina Laden’s witty When Pigasso Met Mootisse (Chronicle Books, 1998) pictures artist Pablo Picasso as a beret-wearing pig and Henri Matisse as a bright-red bull. The artistic pair move into neighboring country houses, which they transform into works of art – but gradually their friendship falls apart as they criticize each other’s styles. (“You paint like a two-year-old!” “You paint like a wild beast!”) Eventually, however, they solve their differences by painting a pair of masterpieces on either side of their dividing fence. For ages 4-9.
	Doris Kutschbach’s The Blue Rider: The Yellow Cow Sees the World in Blue (Prestel, 1997), one of the Adventures in Art series, is the beautifully designed story of a group of innovative painters collectively known as the Blue Riders – among them Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee – who turned the art world upside-down with their creative uses of form and color. Illustrated with brilliantly colored art reproductions and photos of the artists at work. Check out the yellow cow. For ages 8-12.
	Check out Andy Warhol’s Cows and try your hand at the Andy Warhol Cow Wallpaper Game.
	From Artists Helping Children, Cow Crafts for Kids has a long list of cow projects with instructions. Make stand-up paper cows, cow puppets, cow masks, an origami cow, and many more.
	From DLTK, Paper Plate Cow Craft has instructions and a template for making a cool cow mask on a stick.
	At Handprint and Footprint Art, find out how to make a handprint cow. (Also a handprint duck.)
	From Busy Bee, Cow Crafts for Kids has a nice assortment of projects, among them a clothespin calf, a talking cow card, and a cut-and-paste picture of a lush green field filled with thumbprint cows.
	We all know about sock monkeys – so why not a sock cow? Learn to make an adorable one at Sock Cow Tutorial.
	CowParade is a public art exhibit (possibly the world’s largest) in which fiberglass sculptures of cows are decorated by artists and displayed in public places.
	For a cow drawing project for early-elementary kids, see Deep Space Sparkle’s How to Draw a Cow.

COW POEMS

	The National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry (National Geographic Children’s Books, 2012), compiled by J. Patrick Lewis, is a collection of 200 animal-themed poems paired with stunning full-page color photographs. Among the poems: “The Cow” by Robert Louis Stevenson. A gorgeous book for ages 4 and up.
	Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “The Cow” can also be found in A Child’s Garden of Verses (Simon & Schuster, 1999) or online here.
	Gelett Burgess is best known for the immortal four-line poem “I Never Saw a Purple Cow.” This website has a great biography of Burgess (including an account of the fatal Cogswell Fountain Incident), the text of “Purple Cow,” and a list of Burgess’s publications.
	For more on Burgess’s Purple Cow, a lot of purple cow parodies, and a poetry challenge, see How Now, Purple Cow?
	Susan Hawthorne’s Cow (Spinifex Press, 2011) is a fascinating poetry collection in which Queenie, leader of the herd, guides readers through mythology, philosophy, history, and language. For teens and adults.