Color Wheels Composed with Tree Branch Paintbrushes

As part of our Georgia O'Keeffe study, we're also studying art composition, including warm and cool colors and color comparisons. To begin, I asked the children to create their own color wheels. I gave them large-format drawing paper, and since they've both recently learned how to use the compass, I asked them to also draw the wheel from scratch:

This was Syd's introduction to the protractor!

Fortunately, it's quite simple to make a color wheel using a compass, protractor, and ruler:

1. Use the compass to draw a circle as large as the paper will support.
2. Use the center point to help you draw a line straight through the circle with the ruler.
3. Use the protractor to mark a 90-degree angle from this line, also at the center of the circle. Use the ruler to draw the line.
4. Again using the protractor, mark a 45-degree angle in the middle of each 90-degree angle. Use the ruler to draw the lines.

Our Christmas tree is still hanging around--now it's outside on the brush pile, but it nevertheless remains green!--so the children cut their paintbrushes from it. Sensory exploration, creation with a new material, and no need for paintbrush washing--yay!

We own enough Biocolor paints (although after this project, I think I need to restock!) for the children to have completed their color wheels that way, but Syd got it into her head that she'd revolutionize color theory. She'd start with red--

--and then she'd wow the world by showing that you really CAN make all the colors of the color wheel from red!

She got this far:

This also happened, which is why I suspect that I need to check our paint stock:

Will, on the other hand, first studied the provided color wheel--

--and then immediately recreated it on paper:

And after Syd gave up her original idea--alas for the world of color theory!--she started again and created this:

It was very interesting to watch the children handle their tree branch paintbrushes, as they each did so quite differently. Will really embraced the feathering effect of a paintbrush lightly held and vigorously swiped, while Syd held her paintbrush in such a way that all the needles pointed the same direction and allowed her to paint neatly and accurately:

And yet, with both children, it was very apparent by the end of the day that a good time had been had by all:

Although Syd did need to spend quite a bit of time at the sink dealing with those paint cups used in the attempt to prove her grand theory...

At the Indianapolis Museum of Art

With temperatures in Indy in the low 40s instead of the forecasted low 50s, it wasn't the best day to explore the Indianapolis Museum of Art and its expansive outdoor park and gardens, but there was a children's tour I wanted to attend and an aerial silks performance art piece (outdoors, of COURSE) that I'd already bought tickets for, so we all just girded our loins and muscled ahead.

It's always, fortunately, a great day to explore the indoor museum:

Matt and I usually practice a man-on-man defense in museums, which is why I only have photos of one kid OR the other, and none of Matt. He was there, just mostly with Will while I was with Syd. We'd pass each other between galleries and I'd say, "There's a Matisse over there!", or we'd find ourselves in the same gallery and spend a minute all together with the Georgia O'Keefes before I had to take Syd to the bathroom, and as a reward for sitting in the foyer with Will (who threw a fit because there were too many babies and toddlers on the children's tour--she disdains babies and toddlers) while I went on the children's tour with Syd, he got to look around all by himself(!) for half an hour or so while I hung out in the hands-on art room with both kids:

They both stay in the same place pretty well when there's art to be made.

We also huddled together as a family--Syd tucked onto Matt's lap with his arms around her, Will squished between the two of us with one of my arms over the top of her--through the performance art piece, which everyone liked, although we all would have liked it a lot better if we hadn't been so uncomfortably cold:

So walking the grounds didn't happen, and the picnic didn't happen, and the portable art set for making art en plein air that I brought didn't leave the car, but we saw the silks, some of us took the tour, the kids now have postcards featuring Georgia O'Keefe paintings on the walls by their beds, and we'll go back again for all the rest when it's actually sunny and springlike and warm.

Small Town Famous

Even though I made Matt promise to not let me enroll the children in ANY OTHER SUMMER CAMPS this year (sleep-away camp and our big road trip seem like plenty of adventure/expenditure this summer), there are always so many cute and cool and interesting and enriching summer camps on offer--rock climbing camp! horseback riding camp! acting camp! Humane Society camp! archaeology camp! golf camp!--that I nevertheless pored through our local summer camp book that came in the newspaper a few weeks ago, exclaiming over and then having to remind myself not to book every single camp.

As I was carefully reading the entries on one page, trying to decide if maybe I could make an exception for art museum camp, I found my eyes repeatedly drawn to one particular image, and yet it took more than a minute of glancing at it, reading some more, then glancing at it again--

--before I realized, "Oh! We're IN that photo!" It must have been taken in the fall, while Matt was away at a conference. The kids were sad that he'd missed their horseback riding show, so even though I didn't feel like getting out of the house and into the car again, to cheer them up I took them to a children's event at the IU Art Museum.

I had clearly forgotten all about that trip, since I distinctly remember late this winter beating myself up about completely neglecting art history and art appreciation in the children's education. Ah, well... that at least spurred me into redemption; I scheduled what turned out to be a AMAZING field trip for my homeschool group to that very art museum a few weeks ago, and this weekend our whole family is spending the day at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (a place that I have not taken the children since, shockingly, 2009!), including watching an aerial silks show!

With an aerial silks show, make-and-take art projects, a family-friendly tour, and a quick couple of hours spent afterwards at the nearby children's museum, this trip to the art museum will be a raging success.

I may have been gritting my teeth while I wrote that last part.

Potter Badge Activity #1: At the IU Art Museum

Have I mentioned more than a million times yet how much we're all enjoying Girl Scouts? Since their activities are so cross-curricular, and really so embedded in academics, Girls Scouts has really been just a constant source of inspiration for our homeschool this year.

It was Syd's desire to earn her Potter badge that led us to the IU Art Museum on Friday morning, with 30 or so of our homeschooling friends and five docents, for an hour-long tour of the museum's collections. Our group was perfect--three second-grade girls, their parents, and one docent who showed the girls interesting pieces, asked open-ended questions, and took the time to listen to every single thing that every single girl had to say. Syd came away with a thoroughly pleasant impression of the museum, which was exactly what I'd wanted, so yay!

After the tour, my kiddos and I headed back to one particular gallery that had struck Syd's eye during the tour, so that she could complete the first activity for this badge: find a piece of pottery and sketch it:

Here's the piece that she chose:

And here's her sketch!

You can really tell the attention to detail that Syd poured into this sketch, and she's rightfully quite pleased with it.

Will, too, sketched--

--this guy--

--but she left her backpack and sketchbook in the car, I'm not going to go get it, and she, since she's currently running around the house with a friend and a sister, screaming "POW! POW! POW!", and insisting that she has "impervious titanium armor," certainly isn't going to go get it, either, so it will remain undocumented, I suppose.

Next up for the Potter badge are a few of the long-awaited pottery classes, and I'm equally grateful to this badge for being the impetus for me finally providing them for the kids. Here's to a house full of pinch pots, coil vases, and decorated tiles!

Draw Me a Bird

That's a really oblique reference to Let Petit Prince, so don't worry about it.

I mean, to even understand the reference properly, you'd have to be in my head, imagining the voice that I use for the prince when he asks the narrator to draw him a sheep. I can't do that voice out loud, because I'm not a little French boy/space alien, so... yeah.

Also, we didn't even draw sheep, we drew birds, so it's an impossible reference, written only to amuse me, and maybe Matt, for whom I WILL attempt the voice, and he won't even get it, either, and he's my husband and used to the random phrases from books and movies that I pretend are references that another person should get.

Anyway. Birds!

In this lesson of Drawing With Children, the author talks us through drawing a bird on a limb. I'm supposed to read the instructions out loud while modeling them with my own drawing, and the kiddos follow along.

The activity went... okay, but on the fly I made some modifications that made it, and hopefully the future activities from the book, go much better. For instance, Will's first bird drawing was pretty miserable for her to both produce and look at. I couldn't figure out if she was doing the worst possible job on purpose, because sometimes if you ask her to do something that she doesn't want to do she WILL do the worst possible job on purpose to prove a point, or if she was genuinely struggling with the oral directions, because as Matt often reminds me, Will's a very visual learner. So I asked her to draw the bird again, but this time had her read the instructions for herself:

Much happier kid. More more satisfying drawing (see her first attempt there at her elbow?). For future lessons, I'll photocopy the directions and she may read them herself as she follows along with me.

Syd has her own struggles. Although Drawing with Children is adamant that we do not start over and we do not erase (that's why we have to use pens), I did permit Syd to start over as many times as she liked AFTER we'd done the entire drawing properly together one time:

I'm still making them both use Sharpie, however, because I think Syd would be even more of a perfectionist with that thin, erasable pencil line that shows every bump and bobble. Because the Sharpie is that much thicker, I think it plays off a few unsteady strokes or slightly messed up bits that she'd be tempted to fuss about otherwise. In a few more lessons, when they're ready for more precise strokes, I might graduate them to the much thinner black Flair pens.

Thanks to Drawing with Children, I always remind the children now, when they begin an artwork, that it's the details that make a picture "more." I usually reference a famous piece and we discuss the work, the time, and the thought that must have gone into that piece, and how that makes the piece different--not better, but definitely "more"--than a quick sketch.

[Tangent: The last time we discussed this--yesterday, in fact, as the kiddos were beginning to work on creating sarcophagus art--Will asked, "Well, what if a painter put a bunch of work and time and thought into making a painting, and he put a bunch of details in, but it was all black, and it just looked like black paint?"

And I said, "Ooh, well if that painter did put a bunch of work and time and thought into doing that, then of COURSE it could hang in a museum and be art, even if it was just black paint! It would be a fascinating statement about the artistic process!" And then we talked about modern art.

Also, I really hope that Will creates that black painting one day.]

As well as the Drawing with Children advice, though, I also always reference the Waldorf concept of "closing the windows"--of course, we're not bathing every inch of our paper in wet-on-wet watercolor here, but I find the idea of covering your surface with your art helpful for them to think about as they work.

Also helpful, I believe, is that fact that their end results are ALWAYS worth of display on the wall:

Next week, art will consist of something from one of the Draw Write Now books, which I think work GREAT with Drawing with Children, and I'm also realizing that I really should get us back into the regular trips to art museums that we used to be in the habit of.

And y'all, I don't want to brag on myself too much, but I think that my own drawing skills are improving tolerably, as well!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Candle Bling and Kid-Made Jewelry

Both of my tutorials this week came from projects that were really, REALLY big hits with the kids. Over our post-Christmas staycation (oh, how we NEEDED those six days all at home, altogether!), as I worked on a new design for a rainbow beeswax candle--

--Syd worked very hard on a rainbow candle of her own:

Syd maps out her candle design before she begins.

She was pretty thrilled when I showed her how we could personalize her candle with these beeswax sheet cut-outs:

 On another day, I had the idea that the girls might like to use their brand-new, SUPER awesome gel pens (Thanks, Grandma Beck!!!) to make themselves some jewelry, so I cut pendants out of old cardboard record album covers for them. I had planned that they could decorate the blank backs of these pendants, so I fussy cut interesting abstracts from the front cover side, but Willow, who in general is less interested in creating her own drawings from scratch, discovered a passionate interest in (and quite a knack for) embellishing the printed images:

Don't they look great? Gel pens are the perfect tool for an artistic activity like this, because they're vibrant and they stick to a very wide variety of media, looking equally well on rough materials like newspapers and smash books and smooth materials like glossy magazine pages and photographs.

Grandma Beck bought each girl her own large set of gel pens in a metal case, and I keep unabashedly stealing each girl's set for my own work. Every now and then a kid, who has been well-ingrained to pick up her own stuff and who prizes her pen set and so WANTS to keep it nice, will walk by, notice her pen set mysteriously open mysteriously near me, and, giving me a quizzical look, will quietly pack it up and put it away again.

They don't yet know that their mother is a thief--don't YOU tell them!

Our Homeschool Photo Album from Snapfish

How to keep track of all the work done during just one homeschool year?

Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm...

First there's all the written work, you know--workbook pages, reports, copywork, sentence diagrams, Latin translations.

But then there are the big, messy, elaborate projects that make up the bulk of our homeschool days--the big basement timeline, the cave painting, the salt dough maps, the volcanoes in a test tube, the sewing, the baking, the pounds and pounds of clay and gallons of paint and glue that we go through, just the three of us. Can't punch three holes in that and stick it in a binder!

There's also the travel that we're able to do because of our freedom (and my willingness for the younger kid to skip a couple of ballet classes each semester). I consider our trips to beaches and amusement parks and the sites of old forts and Laura Ingalls Wilder's house and museums from Florida to Michigan to be crucial to the kids' education, even if those experiences don't fit well into a binder, either.

And then there's the other, most important category of work that the girls are able to get done with hours to themselves each day: play. How to track the marbles chased down, the structures built, the toy ponies endangered and rescued and married off and endangered again, the sidewalks drawn on with chalk (or painted on with paint--I don't care)?

Oh, and all the books that get read around here! I don't know how you would EVER keep track of that and also do anything else with your life!

Before I deal with that big stack where I date-stamp and then toss the kids' written work, I'll just start with what, for me, is the easiest way to record the travel, the projects, and the play.

Photo album!

Snapfish asked me to test their new 11x14 Lay-Flat Photo Book by making one for myself, so I chose as my topic the previous homeschool year, which in our homeschool runs August-July (we're year-rounders, ya know).

I LOVE the format for putting the book together, especially with the tons of photos that I put per page. Basically (unless you're picky, and then you can alter it), Snapfish determines the best sizing and layout for the photos, and as you drag each new photo onto a page, it immediately rearranges the sizing and layout of the entire page for you--if you don't like it, you can ask it to rearrange it, or rearrange it manually:

I loved the layouts that Snapfish chose for me, and had no problem swapping various photos around the layout to better show off my favorite ones.

You get one text block on each page (as far as I could figure), which I used to caption all of the activities that the photos on that page encompassed. Each two-page spread counted as one month of our homeschool year, and I really wanted another text box to record the month, but I couldn't make it happen for me. One of the paper choices for the photo book did include exactly the kind of calendar set-up that I wanted, but it started with January and couldn't be altered.

No fear--I simply waited until my book came, and then made my months all crafty-like!

With that addition (which makes me happy in particular, since I really like mixed-media projects, anyway), I could not love this photo book more. I think that the reader really gets a sense of the huge variety of projects that the kiddos are invested in every month, and the frequency of our field trips and other travel--it's very light on photos of actual "schoolwork" (oops!), but I don't plan for this to be our only record of the homeschool year, so that's okay.

I also love how easy it is to watch the seasons pass in this book, as the children grow from the beginning of our school year--

image on the free endpaper at the front of the book

--to fall and winter activities, sledding and ice skating on four different pages, and then stomping in mud in their sweaters, and then posing for the big ballet recital in a sleeveless leotard out by the fountain--

--and then finally posing in their pirate garb for Willow's eighth birthday party, right at the end of their school year:

How they've grown!

I chose for the cover image a candid shot that I took of the girls during their T-shirt dress photo shoot--

--and you also get to title the spine, so that I'll be able to pull exactly the year that I'm looking for out of a shelf of fifteen identical photo books when the babes are all done with school:

 

My favorite part, however, is the back cover, where you can put yet another small image and a caption:

Because even more than the chance to travel, and the time to play, and the fast-track to higher-level math, and Latin on the third-grade curriculum, if my girls someday understand that we schooled together all these years simply because of my deep love for them, then we will have had a successful homeschool.

[Snapfish gave me this photo book for free (I paid for the shipping and a couple of extra pages that I added) in exchange for my feedback on it.]

Cave Painting with Story of the World Ancient Times

Why yes, we HAVE been on chapter 1 of volume 1 of The Story of the World for about six months now!

The girls enjoy listening to the audiobooks of all four volumes of Story of the World (which I've burned to mp3 and put on my ipod), so I'd say that they've been skipping around quite a bit of history in their free time, but just when I think that we're ready to move on to, I don't know, chapter TWO?!?, somebody (me) thinks up or comes across another activity related to chapter 1, and somebody else (them) gets hyped up to do it, so there we go.

This time? Cave painting.

Including Paleolithic-era cave painting might be stretching even Bauer's definition of "from the earliest nomads" a little bit, but especially because the girls and I have spent so much time exploring prehistory and the evolution of the earliest humans on our own, I liked the idea of bridging the gap, so to speak, with an activity that connected early nomads to later ones, and I thought it was important to bring more historical (nomads didn't ONLY roam in 7,000 BCE) and geographical context (nomads didn't ONLY roam in the Fertile Crescent) to the study.

Because nomads made lots of cool cave art in lots of cool places during lots of different time periods. My favorite cave painting web sites are these two from France:

• Chauvet Cave
• Lascaux Cave--this site is AMAZING, just so you know. It's a virtual walk-through of the cave, down to the tiniest detail, and you can zoom up in even more detail on each piece of art that you pass, as well as get more information on it.

The Cueva de las Manos in Argentina is also a pretty great cave, but its web site is nothing fancy. 

To make our own cave art, I first created a cave environment by cutting open a ton of brown paper grocery bags and duct taping them all over a wall. The girls' loft bed was still against the wall at that time, so I taped the bags right over the planks of the bed that were against the wall, adding some dimension to the cave, since that was very important to many cave artists. 

Since the cave was a temporary installation, I prepared several pots of tempera (tempera's quality is crap, so it's unsuited to make any art that you want to keep, but it's so cheap that it's perfect for process-based work), and handed it all off to the kids:

I didn't give the kids any instructions (other than "We only paint on the brown paper") but we've read so many books about cave art, and seen so many visual examples, that I shouldn't be surprised at how traditional their work was:

It ended up as QUITE the fabulous cave:

Because we'd all been so intrigued by our study of Cueva de las Manos, I set up a second smaller cave wall specifically to do hand stencils. I used our liquid watercolors in spritz bottles, which work great on brown paper bags:

It was REALLY messy--of COURSE!--but turned out great. The kids both stenciled both of their hands (spritzing that bottle is an excellent fine motor-strengthening activity, especially for the non-dominant hand), and I even convinced Matt that he should join me in stenciling our hands, too, so that we ended up with a Paleolithic family portrait, of sorts:

Other than the aforementioned web sites, here are the other resources that we pored over to learn about cave painting:

• Recipe and Craft Guide to France
• Art: The Definitive Visual Guide
• The Cave Painter of Lascaux
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams
• Europe before Rome