Homeschool Day at the IMA

At least, that's what it used to be called before the Indianapolis Museum of Art changed its name to Newfields, but it takes me something like a decade before I can resign myself to a building changing its name (I've just this year begun to think about referring to the local university's main library by its "new" name, bestowed in 2005, and I still don't think I'll ever call the IU Art Museum by its proper new name), and anyway, the IMA's new name doesn't rhyme with "Homeschool Day," so there you go.

Now that the kids are older, we don't do nearly as many of these "what the hell, might as well go check this place out" field trips as we used to. Mostly, of course, I think that's because we've already done them all, and we're still plenty busy with topic-oriented field trips, places like the local news station when we're studying meteorology, or backpacking hikes so the kids can earn their Girl Scout Outdoor Journey, or even someplace that we study because we know that we're going there, like, you know, Hawaii.

But, you know, sometimes I'm checking my email during the super boring Girl Scout volunteer meeting (yay for free wifi!), get an email from the IMA about their upcoming Homeschool Day, and because the guest speaker is still going on about something or other of primary interest to Daisies and Brownies I check my planner, see that we're free that day, and impulse buy us tickets. Online shopping is a great distraction from a Powerpoint presentation!

I even snookered Matt into coming with us, although I doubt he'll get suckered in again after having to live with my Yes We're Packing Lunch Because Food There Is Expensive rule. You'd think he would have learned after the Art Institute of Chicago Hot Dog Fiasco of Ridiculousness, but his optimism remains unshaken and adorable.

Or he might stay away because of the other thing that always happens, entitled Other People Try to Talk to Us and We Don't Like Them. But if that didn't always happen, miserable as it is, our official lunchtime conversation topic of Name the Most Annoying Person You Encountered This Morning would just go nowhere, and then what would we have to talk about? The art?!?

Don't worry. We didn't talk about the art at lunch on this day, because the docents who checked us in that morning basically made fun of me for not having the same last name as the rest of my family, and there were a bunch of people standing in front of the bathroom door, not doing anything bathroom related, when Will was trying to go, and some woman tried to tell Matt that the whole drawing table she was sitting at was reserved and the docent had to come up and tell her that we could sit there, and then that SAME RANDOM WOMAN told Syd that we weren't supposed to draw with the watercolor pencils, and so then of course Will had to start drawing with them, too, in solidarity.

Yeah, Matt is for sure never coming out with us on another homeschool field trip...

You can also tell that homeschool field trips are old news by the fact that I didn't even bring my nice camera (okay, it's also because once I did bring my nice camera here and I got in trouble and now I'm scared)! My cell phone camera is crap, but I nevertheless couldn't help taking at least a few pictures:

Here, Syd is supposed to be sketching the art, but on this week she was ALL fired up about the ensemble designs she wants for next year's Trashion/Refashion Show, and all of her sketches are of outfits made of trash and related to the seasons. At least it's creative, I guess...

This is always the kids' favorite piece.

 They also like, and are forever baffled, by this one:





The blocks below were in an exhibit on interior design, but look how brilliant they are! They're clear, hollow L-shaped blocks, partially filled with different materials, and someone needs to make them commercially and sell them to me a decade ago for my kids:

No, I apparently don't have any actual pictures of the actual art, although I know that we looked at most of it. I finally understand the point of pointillism now, too, so that's pretty cool.

Great art museums on every corner are where I really feel a lack in our community--sure, we can trek to Indy to check out Homeschool Day at the IMA, or visit the one sculpture trail further south, or keep hanging on until our local university's art museum opens back up after its current remodeling, but I like to think that if we lived somewhere like Washington, D.C., New York City, Los Angeles, or, you know, London, we'd be out and about at art museums and installations and exhibits all the time. Is that true, do you think? Do you guys who live in all the awesome places do all the awesome things? Or are there annoying people there who might talk to you, too, so you stay home and sit on your couch where it's safe?

The Weirdest Puzzle

I wrote several years ago about our family Thrift Store Puzzle Philosophy, and we still hold to it. I can't tell you the number of puzzles that have come and gone over the years--certainly more than our house could hold if we'd had our hearts set on keeping them all!

This puzzle, though, is something special. First of all, it's round, which is unusual:

Primarily, though, this puzzle is just very, very strange:

Okay, yes, it's all cats. That is very, VERY weird.

But these cats? They're also all consecrated religious, and they are acting VERY irreverently:

Yeah, that's a feline nun. Dancing. With a feline monk.

DANCING.

Dancing while TOUCHING.

Very irreverent, indeed!

The entire puzzle represents male and female consecrated religious have a giant party. I can't imagine what on earth the artist was thinking. There are SO many weird things going on here.

For instance, check out this act of charity:

So those are anthropomorphized consecrated religious cats, sitting on the steps eating from a plate, and there are non-anthropomorphized cats around them begging for food.

Are the non-anthropomorphized cats meant to represent the laity? Are they begging for the fruit of salvation? Or... did the artist just think that it would be cute to have cats begging from cats?

It's all so deeply suspect, yet presented so lightheartedly, that I can't figure it out. It's as if Martin Luther, instead of writing his 95 Theses, decided to draw an adorable cartoon and never tell anyone whether or not he was being ironic.

Because OMG look at this!!!

Was the artist trying to make a statement about sexual impropriety between nuns and monks, or is it just supposed to be cute? Is that non-anthropomorphized black cat next to the cat nun meant to symbolize witchcraft, or is it just... there?

Because the implications make a VERY troubling set of statements, but the whole thing is so cute! Does anyone really make a set of statements this troubling by means of a cartoon this cute? I mean, normally when you want to draw worldly sin, you channel your inner Hieronymus Bosch, you know? Not your inner Charles Shulz.

Here are another couple of weird excerpts. We've got a feline Mary and Jesus (but an avian dove)--

--and a domestic cat Adam but a lion God, but domestic cat angels, and there are more non-anthropomorphized cats:

So in this reality, God did not make his creatures in his image, or is the artist making a broader statement about species identification and implying that we should respect monkeys and apes as also containing the divine spark?

If I was still an academic, I would write SO MANY PAPERS about this puzzle.

I'm not, though, so when we were done, I flipped it over and painted a new puzzle for the kids on the back. That was only because there were a few pieces, though--if this puzzle had been intact, I would be hoarding it as-is forever, probably painted with one of those Puzzle Saver solutions and hung on my study wall with all my other weird things.

Homeschool Art: The Fake Slime Spill

We did not do this project on the first day of April, but it WOULD make a terrific April Fool's Day prank!

You might remember that Syd has been obsessed with slime since... honestly, I think it's been since before slime became a universal tween obsession. It's been a looooooong time. We've been making oobleck and gak since the kids were babies, but Syd, especially, has taken ownership of the slimer lifestyle since at least 2015.

She did an entire science fair presentation on slime in 2017!

In 2018, while she was away at camp, I set her up with an entire slime studio space, and I haven't yet regretted having one place where all the slime stuff lives.

Well, I mean sometimes I regret it a little, because it usually looks like this:



But whatever. We don't like that carpet anyway. And we didn't keep our stuff nice even before we had kids, so it's not like they're even the main reason that all our stuff looks like junk.

For this art lesson, I found a slime tie-in and we also explored our other favorite pastime, tormenting Matt.

To begin, we watched this excellent video from PBS Digital Studios:



Our local university's art museum actually owns one of these Duchamp fountains, so we've seen it several times before. There are also these stories of artist's pranks to peruse:

• Banksy destroys his painting (and graffiti in general, a topic that we've also explored and that interests Will, in particular)
• Students put a pineapple in a museum.
• Teenagers put glasses on the floor of an art museum.

I think the most salient point to make is that by utilizing an artifact to comment on an aspect of our social conditioning, you can defend the claim that this IS art!

What we're about to do, however, is not art. It's just messing with Matt.

I taught the kids that adding paint to white glue will dye the glue. Here, we're using powdered tempera, ideally to keep the consistency of the glue/paint mixture thick, but you can also use craft acrylics (we still have a couple of bottles of this particular set of homemade school glue dyed with acrylic paint, and they're still great!):

Cover a tray with a piece of waxed paper, then comes the best part: make a spill!

The kids tried a couple of different containers, but the most realistic, I think, was the exact same little deli containers that Syd uses to store her slime. Will made a fake spill from a plastic cup, but it didn't end up looking like anything that would be consumable.

After the spills are settled, you have to find an out-of-the-way spot for them to dry out for several days. I didn't mark the time on this, but I wouldn't have been surprised if it was at least a couple of weeks before the kids could peel their fake spills away from the waxed paper.

Shortly before Matt was expected to come home one evening, Syd chose her favorite of the fake spills and set it on the rug in our family room--not right in the middle, but off in a corner, where it could conceivably have gone unnoticed by us during the day. It was next to the coffee table, as if fallen from where a careless child had set it.

I wasn't in the family room when Matt came through, but I clearly heard him saying, "What is THIS?!? SYDNEY!!!!! GET IN HERE!!!!!!!" Bless her heart, she couldn't even keep a straight face for a second, which just made Matt madder until he reached down to pick up the slime container and the whole thing lifted neatly off the rug and the prank was clear. It was possibly one of the best moments of Syd's life to date.

Unfortunately, the prank only worked once, as a similar slime spill in our bedroom was ignored, and so was one in the playroom (fortunately for Syd, because that one was NOT one of the fake ones...). But the kids had made their point, using a created artifact to comment on the social norms of family life and the surface-level assumptions of what it means to be "clean" in society today.

Okay, I made that up. This one wasn't art--just a prank!

Homeschool Book Review: The Art of Doodle Words

I'm happy to admit that art is the hardest subject for me to incorporate into our homeschool. Syd is a gifted artist and needs lots of art enrichment, but resents any art instruction that doesn't come from her father, who fortunately is also a gifted artist, but is not at her beck and call, and certainly not during the average school day.

Will's gifts lie elsewhere, which means that she needs art just as much but is often clueless about how to go about it, and reluctant to pursue it.

I try to incorporate a weekly hands-on art project that both kids can engage in despite their varying skill levels. I've tried and so far failed but have high hopes to try again in the winter semester to include a comprehensive art history study. What has worked most consistently, however, for several months now, is to include daily art time in Syd's weekly homeschool work plans. She is generally left to do what she pleases during this time--mostly mermaid drawings or more panels for her comic strip about office workers who are also cats--but is expected to be accountable for what she's been working on, and to keep a portfolio of her work.

Every now and then, however, I come across an art book that I think Syd will really love, and I'll assign it to her for her week's work. Such it was with The Art of Doodle Words, which I received for free from a publicist. I handed it off to Syd, said, "Here you go. Show me what you make!" and left her to it.

And she made lots!

The book is super clever, in that it shows you how to incorporate themed doodles into words, kind of like your own Google Doodles. It's the perfect book for a tween who loves to draw, loves things to be cute, and is extremely clever.

I love her whale:

Her cat is a little more abstract, but I can read it, especially the yarn ball "C":

Here, I think, is where she really started to get the hang of it. All of "BACON" is made of bacon--except for the "O", which is an egg, and her cotton candy looks just the way that I feel after eating cotton candy:

I actually didn't even see, at first, that the dots on the "I"s are the eyes of the smiley face. How clever is that?!?

I like the way that Syd started to play around with the concept more after a while. She didn't doodle the actual letters in "DREAM," but played more upon the overall idea of dreaming to make a more complex sketch:

And now she's moved into slogans!

The pizza would look cute in color, I think, but I really like the bites taken out:

 And the fox is very adorable and autumn-themed:

This was such an easy book for Syd to follow, and the concept was clear-cut and easy to recreate, but it was a very valuable way to spend a week of art, because the extensions to this idea are unlimited. We've got this book in our home library now, shelved with our other art books (because you know that I have our home library shelved according to Library of Congress call numbers, right?), so that Syd can continue to refer to it as her interests change and experience grows. Syd's also really into black and white right now, but I think these would look well with color, Prismacolor markers or perhaps even watercolors.

That was by far the easiest hands-on art unit that I've ever planned!

P.S. Want to learn more about our hands-on homeschool and all the fun projects that work (and, more importantly, don't work!!!)? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Hands-On Fibonacci Sequence Explorations: Combining Logic, Math, and Art

I've realized that much of the hands-on math enrichment that I offer the kids is "number sense"--helping to develop their intrinsic understanding of numbers, their flexibility with them, their pattern recognition of number relationships. Whether it's fractions or geometry or exponents that we're studying, I always see space in their curriculum where free exploration can make kids wiser in what they're studying.

In algebra right now, the older kid is studying proportions and ratios, so what better time to spend some more time on the Golden Ratio?

I introduced the kids to the basic concept of the Fibonacci Sequence and how it's calculated, then asked them to use each number in the sequence as one side of a square. They were to draw those squares on 1cm graph paper, color them in, and cut them out. I told them that they should stop only when the next square would not fit onto a single piece of graph paper, although if we did this project again, I'd tape together larger sheets of graph paper ahead of time so that they could extend the sequence further.

Here's one of the sets that the kids came up with:

Apologies for the poor lighting in these photos, but school gets done on rainy days as well as sunny!

You can make lots of pretty patterns with just these squares. And yes, I DO think that Fibonacci Sequence stacking blocks would be AWESOME!

Next, I told the kids that these squares of the Fibonacci Sequence are also a puzzle, and I challenged them to use all of their squares to make a rectangle. They're familiar with this idea from the pentominoes that we've played with.

Here is the older kid's rectangle:

And here is the younger kid's!

The kids did not confer, so I think it's interesting that both built their rectangles the same way, and neither happened upon the "spiral." In fact, when I later rearranged the pieces to show the spiral, the younger kid still didn't really see it. This is where more and larger squares would have helped by extending the pattern.

I took away the larger squares, and had the kids solve the puzzle to make a rectangle with only the three smallest:

Then I added the next piece, and again asked them to solve the puzzle:

Do this again and again, and you see how the pattern can be formed:

Beautiful, isn't it?

In related news, we were at the US Space and Rocket Center last week for the older kid's Space Camp graduation (more on that another time!!!), and in their museum, look at the display that we found!

It was particularly terrific because it extended the pattern for us to see!

 I didn't look at any additional resources with the kids until after they'd worked the "puzzle," because I didn't want them to see a solution, but later in the day we watched these two YouTube videos from two of my favorite YouTube channels:

Here are some other great Fibonacci resources that we've been exploring:

• Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci
• Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature
• The Rabbit Problem

And here are some more ways to explore the Fibonacci Sequence in logic, math, and art:

• Fibonacci circle art. This project is to circles what my project is to squares. 
• Here's how to draw the spiral from the squares.
• Here's how to see the spiral in nature. We struggled with this for a while, and Syd is still somewhat of a nonbeliever. 

This project gave inspired me to come up with some more extension ideas just for me. I think it would be really cool to design a large-format squares of the Fibonacci Sequence, print it, and glue it to foam board the way that Matt and I did with the decanomial square. Imagine how many more interesting patterns you could come up with. I also deeply need to sew a Fibonacci sequence quilt.

As if I don't already have enough dream projects on my to-do list!

We Went to Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago

Finally finished with all of his boring workity-work, Matt was able to spend our last day in Chicago with us. We tooled through Daley and Millennium Parks plenty more, but our ultimate destination was the Art Institute of Chicago.

Let's see some fancy art!

This one politely accommodated my baffling request to pose with the work of art.

This one... not so much. I love how even Van Gogh, himself, is giving her a look of exasperation.

I sort of got them to do this one, but then, even I gave up. Really, all I wanted to do was reshoot it with the kid holding the pitchfork in the correct hand! You'd think I was proposing that she do something genuinely embarrassing!

 To be fair, I really AM an embarrassing person to be with.

I studied Medieval Christian art, in part, in grad school, and I have a special talent for identifying all the people and icons in Crucifixion scenes, so I insisted on doing a lot of that at the museum. Lots of "Look, there's Mary, obviously, because she's about to faint, but check out the ginger chick literally trying to scale the cross--that's Mary Magdalene! Oh, and see the guy with the spear? Ooh, and the other guy with the cup? We could totally start our own magical quest to go look for them in real life--it's the basis for, like, every good adventure movie!"

In between medieval art, Van Gogh, and American Gothic, we saw all the other things:

This one is interesting because that blue chick in the foreground was at one point CUT OUT of the painting on account of she's scandalous. She was reattached, but if you look closely, you can see the seams.

  

We did a lot of looking at all the things, and then took a lunch break.

We travel a lot, and when we do, I like to pack practically all of our food for the trip. Fast food is unhealthy, sit-down food is expensive (and still tends to be unhealthy), and both options are more time-consuming than simply sitting down and eating one's packed sandwich, chips, and clementine. I like to plan for a couple of special meals during a trip, but I've found that it's just much easier to budget for groceries than it is for restaurants, and I find the experience of sitting in a park eating sandwiches to be much more enjoyable than sitting in a restaurant eating a meal.

The kids and I are easy with food--in the hotel room in the morning, we make nut butter and jelly sandwiches and bag up some chips and decide who wants clementines and who wants baby carrots and we're done until dinner. As we walked out of the art museum and into the park for lunch, however, the kids and I discussing who had made what kind of sandwich (there was a rare jar of Nutella in our grocery bag on this trip, and it had been featured in all kinds of yummy combinations), Matt reminded us all that he is NOT easy with food.

In fact, just between you and me, Matt is a fussy eater.

I offered the man half of my almond butter and raspberry jam bagel. The younger kid said that he could have some of her Nutella and jelly sandwich. There were two perfectly good granola bars up for grabs by anyone. But Matt insisted, "No, I want REAL food!"

Real food, hmm? Real food. As opposed to the imaginary lunches that I have been feeding my children as I chaperone them around Chicago and show them all the sights all by myself for two days, eh?

Fine. Since we're walking to the park, anyway, and since hot dogs are on my list of Chicago meals that I wanted to experience during our visit (we'd eaten the other item, deep-dish pizza, for dinner the other night), I suggested that we eat hot dogs instead of our packed lunches.

The kids' hot dogs had onions and relish and mustard on them. My hot dog had onions, relish, mustard, vinegar, tomato slices, jalapeños, and a pickle.

Matt's hot dog? It consisted of a plain weiner on a plain bun. A toddler wouldn't even order a hot dog that way. It was also probably--what, 400 calories, max? How that man planned to sustain himself through an entire afternoon at an art museum and then a walk back to the hotel and then an hour's drive on to the Indiana Dunes I do not know.

But at least it was real food.

My hot dog, just in case you're keeping score, was quite delicious.

Matt and I had seen our must-sees in the morning, but the museum also has a Family Scavenger Hunt, and kids get a prize for completing it, so we devoted the afternoon to that, putting the kids in charge of all navigation and clue deciphering:

Let me tell you--this scavenger hunt MADE our trip to the art museum. The kids dutifully followed us around all morning and looked at all the stuff and were interested, but it was clear that it was OUR thing, you know? But the Family Scavenger Hunt was their thing, and so they had to figure out the navigation and the clues.

Can I just say that navigating the Art Institute of Chicago is impossible? It wouldn't be terribly laid out if the signage was better, but most of the time it's absent, and when it is there, it's confusing--I swear that at one staircase, the American Art sign pointed in two different directions, and neither way would really get you to American Art.

Add to that the fact that although each gallery has a number, that number is not always (or often) displayed in that gallery, so that you can see where you actually are in order to navigate from there. The older kid would study the map deeply, draw our path from where we were to where we wanted to go, and then we'd still get lost getting there, because we couldn't follow the numbers:

Nevertheless, the Family Scavenger Hunt was huge fun, AND it got us all over the museum, looking at exhibits like the fascinating miniatures, and the paperweights, that I otherwise wouldn't have gone to see.

The kids have been asked to figure out what animal inspired the dragon's tail (it's an alligator!).

After we completed the scavenger hunt, the kids got prizes (mini sketchbooks--very awesome) and I bought postcards. I'm a big postcard buyer, but art museums are really the only places that you can still get a good selection of postcards. At a buck or so each, I feel like art print postcards are a decent price for a mini-print of a piece of art--I always pick out a few for our gallery wall or our homeschooling, and I always let the kids each choose one to put on the wall by their beds.

Our visit to Chicago connected us to lots of subjects that I'd like to slowly continue to explore in the next few weeks, not the least of which is a deeper study of some of the artists and artworks that we encountered here.

Here are some more of the Chicago-themed resources that we've been enjoying:

• A History Lover's Guide to Chicago
• DK Eyewitness Chicago
• Iconic Chicago Dishes, Drinks, and Desserts
• I Survived the Great Chicago Fire, 1871
• Hannah G. Solomon Dared to Make a Difference
• Falcons in the City: The Story of a Peregrine Family
• Chicago History for Kids: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Windy City