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!

Crafty Book Review: Drawing Wild Animals, and 8 More Art Activities for Biology

I've mentioned off and on for years now how much the kids enjoy how-to-draw books. Every now and then I'll check out a pile of them from the library, and every now and then a publicist will send us a free one to play with.

Our most recent review copy is Drawing Wild Animals, which is coming in super useful for our Honors Biology study. The animals are categorized by class, with examples of mammals, amphibians, and reptiles represented. Some of the animals that the book shows you how to draw, such as the frog, toad, and salamander, are animals that the kids can practice from the book, then draw again as we do nature studies. We can do the same drawing practice, but then visit the zoo to study and draw animals like the tiger, giraffe, rhinoceros, zebra, elephant, lemur, and rattlesnake.

And, of course, some of the animals we can just draw for fun! Here are some sketches that Will made from the book the other day:

Will doesn't consider herself to be a competent artist, which means that she's often reluctant to do art. I'm always thrilled, then, when a resource is so deliciously tempting that even she will happily partake! And, of course, it helps when it's user-friendly enough that she's pleased with what she creates--that's positive reinforcement for practicing art!

Syd does consider herself to be an artist--and oh, she's a wonderful, gifted artist, indeed. Here's what she drew:

I think the detailing on the antlers, and the hair on the... hare... are new techniques that she picked up from the book. Super useful to be able to draw antlers and bunny fur!

Syd has sometimes been less engaged in our extensive biology studies this past year, so I'm contemplating deliberately incorporating more art into our biology. Syd always likes to do art! Here are some of the ideas that I've been researching:

1. I love these free, downloadable artist's study lessons. The first grade packet includes a close reading and extension activities for The Peaceable Kingdom; the second grade packet includes Tiger in a Tropical Storm; and fourth grade has an Audubon plate and The Horse Fair.
2. The Endangered Species Art Contest takes place every year!
3. There's also a National Fossil Day art contest!
4. A magazine collage would be fun for younger kids to create.
5. Look how beautiful these feather prints are!
6. You can make a life cycle story board for for every unique life cycle that you study.
7. This photo tutorial is for a papier mache dinosaur, but papier mache would work for any whole-body animal study, or even as a project on cells or organ systems.
8. The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has an entire curriculum about paleo art. It's young for my two, but easily adaptable.

I feel like I'm on the right track with this, but I don't think I've yet hit on anything that would be a meaningful contribution to our study and would fill Syd with excitement. Let me know if you've got other suggestions for me!

Thank-You Notes from Color and Create Greeting Cards

You can probably guess this about me, but I don't buy store-bought greeting cards. I mean, we've got card stock and pens, so why not save the money for sushi and/or doughnuts instead?

Will's getting old enough that she doesn't love making her own cards anymore, so I might stock her up with some stationery cards sometime, if I ever see any with dragonriders or howling wolves or a catalog of medieval swords on the front, but Syd is still my go-to girl for cardmaking. She'll probably draw a fat unicorn on the front of your card, whatever the occasion, but homemade it is!

I received a copy of Color and Create Greeting Cards free for review the other day, though, and it's been kind of that perfect bridge between store-bought and homemade, great for those times when you want to make a handmade card but you're not feeling especially crafty. It's basically adult coloring pages in greeting card form. You can do one whenever the occasion arises, or you can fill them in whenever you like, listening to music and drinking wine, and then just pop one out, ready to go, when it's needed.

Syd and I have been living our lives listening to Story of the World v. 2 in order to keep up with the frantic timeline of Will's AP European History class, so we've been coloring a LOT while the audiobook plays. Although in this pic, it looks like Syd is actually secretly listening to her new obsession, Mr. Terrupt:

Yep, I knew it--Story of the World doesn't come in playaway!

You can fancy these cards up even more, if you're minded to, as I discovered when Will spilled her tea on the edge of the card I was coloring. I let it dry and colored over it on the front, but then Will cut around the design, making the edges more interesting (and cutting off some of that tea stain...) and I used double-sided tape to line the inside with colored paper, hiding the rest of the tea stain and making the card look different and interesting:

You should probably also do this if you insist on coloring your card with permanent markers, as permanent markers will bleed through a little bit, but I think my kids are the only ones who insist on using our permanent markers for Every. Single. Thing.

Using permanent markers for every single thing means that when you misspell something, you have to draw a giant star to cover it up:

And that's our first round of thank-you cards finished and mailed! If you've purchased something from the kids during their Girl Scout fall product sale, you can expect to receive a thank-you note, too! If you haven't purchased anything from them, but you long to support exciting adventures and girl-led experiences by buying nuts and candy, you can click through to the nuts and candy shop that Will created.

If you subscribe to magazines, you can renew your subscription through the magazine shop that Will created, and part of your subscription money goes to the troop.

Next month, our Girl Scout troop is going to spend the night at the Indiana Motor Speedway and ride our bikes around the track! For those of you following along on Girl Scout adventures, that's after we go to the Girl Scout national convention and before we spend the night at the City Museum in St. Louis. It'll probably be after we make shoeboxes for hurricane relief (if you make them when there's not a hurricane, then the non-profit can send them off right away after the next one) and certainly before the Christmas shoeboxes. It may be after our primitive camping adventure, depending on the late October weather, but who knows? The weather has been weird this year.

"Resist!" Perler Bead Sign from Crafting the Resistance

The tutorial in Crafting the Resistance makes a knitted bookmark, but I don't have knitting needles and yarn and... knitting skills. I don't have those, either.

You know what I DO have?



Perler beads. Audiobooks. A kid who loves nothing better than to sit down and hang out and craft with me.

So that's what we did! This project is modified from the Well Read Bookmarks in Crafting the Resistance; I followed the chart, but instead of knitting the pattern, I created it in Perler beads:

Yep, those are GLOW-IN-THE-DARK Perler beads there! You can resist even at night!

The kid? She made herself a giant Applejack:

I received a pdf of the book from the publicist for review; I actually find craft books really hard to review over pdf, but it IS handy to be able to simply print a page to access the template.

Applejack now lives on the wall in the kids' bedroom where Syd is displaying her Perler Bead My Little Ponies--

This is one of the results of the kids' bedroom redesign: dedicated display space for Syd's My Little Pony collection! Right now, we've got her Perler Bead Ponies and a framed piece of fanart that I bought her from a Comic-Con, but I'm hoping to add small shelves and convince Syd that her My Little Pony toys could live there, too.

--and the "Resist!" sign now lives above the big work table in our studio--



--where it can inspire us to use our hands to change the world.

Crafty Book Review: Once Upon a Piece of Paper

Although for most of the year Matt gives the children art lessons as part of our weekend time together, the early part of the year is NOT conducive to this--this morning, for example, he took the younger kid to ballet, then while she's there he's going to swing by the Girl Scout office and pick up another 900+ Girl Scout cookies, then go pick up the kid and take her straight to a cookie booth with another Girl Scout at the mall for two hours, then come home for two hours, then take both kids over to the next town over for a three-hour cookie booth, then drive home, get home around 10 pm, and put the kids straight to bed because we have another cookie booth at 10 am tomorrow. Meanwhile, the older kid is having some leisure time this morning before joining everyone for this evening's booth, and I am going to write this blog post and then spend the next twelve hours sewing the younger kid's  Trashion/Refashion Show garment. And then I'm going to figure out the wattage of a strand of Christmas lights so I can do the math to calculate how many batteries I'll need to run them (don't let me forget to adjust for an 80% efficiency rate) so the younger kid can wear them as part of her garment. And then I'm gonna go make that happen.

You can see that we're a tad too busy this month for a leisurely afternoon of art instruction, so I've been intentionally incorporating experiential art lessons, the kind that are more focused on creativity than technique, into our school weeks. We've been getting an especial amount of use out of Once Upon a Piece of Paper, which I was given for free by a publicist. It doesn't intimidate the older kid, since it doesn't focus on drawing by hand (which she wrongly thinks that she's bad at), and it offers the scope for imagination that inspires the younger kid to go all-out in the crazy-detailed way that she enjoys.

We've made some of the projects more elaborate than the book asks for them to be, simply because they're so fun. This project, for instance, was simply meant to be a quick pass across three or so surfaces, to teach us that groupings often look very nice--

--but I pulled out some small canvases that I purchased at some time or other, and then we somehow all got really invested in our work. Instead of one quick swath of paint, the younger kid layered and overlapped and added many, many, MANY swaths--

--and that treasure trove of National Geographics that we scored at the public library's last book sale came in very handy, indeed:

  The kids both really ran with the process and ended up with some super cool results:

We got so invested in doing the project our own way that we completely forgot to even peek into the pad of collage paper that comes with the book. Both kids remembered it for the ice cream project, though:

The project was mostly about making interesting and unusual paper combinations, and seeing how surprisingly well they tend to work together (using ice cream cones for this is pretty brilliant, because it turns out that EVERYTHING looks cute as an ice cream cone!), but the younger kid added an entire narrative to hers, and those awesome collage people?

She has never made anything like that before! I really love the woman at the top--the younger kid wants the red piece to be hair, but I think it looks exactly like a scarf. The younger kid also doesn't think that the blue figure at the bottom looks like a robot at ALL, but I do, and it cracks me up that there's a robot just casually downing some ice cream with all the other folks.

Considering that my goal for each art lesson is for the older kid to feel comfortable and confident being creative, and for the younger kid to learn a new skill or technique, I'd have to say that we didn't do too shabbily even without our Husband/Father Artist-in-Residence to guide us!

Coloring Book Review: Draw and Color Your Way to a Younger Brain

From the title, I'd say that Draw and Color Your Way to a Younger Brain (which I received for free from a publicist), is meant for older folks, but it turns out that artsy little tweens also like it quite a lot.

This is now Syd's special coloring book, and she's obsessed with it. She doesn't even have to play by our usual house rule of photocopying what you want to color from the coloring book first, then coloring the copy--it's that important to her to color the originals, just as they are in the book.

The book is a lot like the kid-centric doodle books that Syd also loves, but with more detailed and less silly prompts. It has a lot of "finish this picture" prompts, but also ones that invite you to continue adding detail to an embellished picture, ones that invite you to draw the mirror image of a picture, and ones that ask you to color in the detailed images that adult coloring books are made of.

Here are some of Syd's most recent creations:

finish this picture

adult coloring

mirror drawing

and some more adult coloring that Syd clearly found VERY inspiring!

That last one, in particular, is so pretty that I think that I'm going to frame it for her room.

We've got a Spring Break road trip coming up in a month (and yes, I am counting down the days to it!), so part of my to-do list for the week includes hiding this book from Syd, so that when I whip it out at the start of our trip she'll still have plenty of pages to work on. This, and Junior Ranger books, and audiobooks, and travel Scrabble and Blokus should hopefully keep us entertained!

Our Favorite Kids' Books of 2016

As a family, we have read thousands of books this year. To be fair, the older kid, who reads several multi-chapter books every single day, has pulled most of the weight in getting us to this number, but the rest of us are no book-reading slouches, either!

That being said, I actually feel a lot more confident in giving out our favorite book recommendations for 2016. I mean, we played with a few toys in 2016, but we read a LOT of books.



We came to this late in the year--I'd read Wonder before, but the kids just read it last month for a library book club meeting. It was, however, a revelation for them, one of those instances when someone reads the perfect book at the perfect time. The older kid, who normally prefers books that take place in imaginary realms or at least star talking animals, even loved the book, and the younger kid listened to it once, read it once, listened to the Playaway of the Wonder stories SEVEN times, read pretty much all of Mr. Brown's Book of Precepts out loud, and recently requested the Wonder Playaway again so that she could listen to it some more. It's a beautiful book about a kid dealing with a really big difference, and all the other kids in his life who have to learn how to accept really big differences.

And if you read it, you MUST read the Wonder stories next. Julian's chapter touched me more than the entire first book.



Percy Jackson has been another absolute phenomenon this year, at least in the younger kid's world. The older kid and I have read them all, but the younger kid? Oh, my gosh, she LIVED in them. For months. Still does. She talks about Percy and Annabeth like they are friends who live in the next town over, and knows just as much about their god and goddess parents. This obsession was the inspiration for our current Greek mythology unit study, which has been just as big of a hit with both kids.

The younger kid likes Riordan's other series, as well, but that's nothing in comparison to how deeply she feels for Percy.



Normally, the older kid has a "love 'em and leave 'em" attitude towards the dozens of books that she blows through every week, but Skulduggery Pleasant has stuck with her. The books are witty, gothic but not spooky, and full of adventure and intrigue, She is smitten by the idea of "taken names," and is desperately into the intricate plot of the series of books.



We all really like these books of famous events and stories retold in LEGO, but the older kid especially loves them, and has discovered new genres of literature and new events in history. The assassinations book isn't completely kid-friendly (although... why would you assume a book about assassinations would be?), as one of the highlights of the story of Boston Corbett (the guy who killed John Wilkes Booth), is that he was a religious fanatic who castrated himself before dinner one evening because he was upset at having been tempted by some prostitutes during his walk home.

And yeah, there's a LEGO illustration for that. Anyway, the older kid was totally titillated by this tale, so much so that we conducted more research on Corbett, and even found some photos of the hole that he spent the latter part of his life in---yes, a hole. The older kid REALLY wants to make a pilgrimage there one day.



We read a LOT of comics and graphic novels in our family, but many of them aren't kid-friendly. The older kid can read whatever she wants, but the younger kid is my baby, so it's nice to have graphic novels that everyone can enjoy, but that she, especially really likes. Phoebe and Her Unicorn is super kid-friendly, but it's not baby-ish--the unicorn has an attitude, and the banter between the two is witty and engaging. Phoebe and Her Unicorn is actually a comic strip, and it's my dream that one day it will run in our newspaper, perhaps instead of For Better or For Worse, which I abhor.



 And speaking of graphic novels that the younger kid loves... she has spent the entire year worshiping Raina Telgemeier. First, she fell in love with her Babysitter's Club adaptations--and I even tried to give her the novels, but she didn't like them, just Telgemeier's graphic novels of them--then she discovered her original works, and has eagerly read all of them several times. I also really like her work, which has the kind of drama that many tweens like, but isn't schlocky. Her newest novel, Ghosts, has only been out for a couple of months, so it's still possible that you could happily surprise a kid who hasn't read it yet.



I've mentioned a few times before that we have a Family Read-Aloud. Now that the kids are older and their evening extracurriculars run later, we don't do this as often as we used to, but at least two or three nights a week, we come together as a family and Matt reads us the next chapter of our current book. The kids and I braid each other's hair, or color in our Tolkien coloring book, or just sit under a blanket and listen. For over a year now, it's been Tolkien, first The Hobbit, and now we're well into The Lord of the Rings--it'll probably take us another year, at least, to finish! I am very adamant that the kids do not see film adaptations of books until they've read the books, so although we've watched the Hobbit films as a family (with MUCH criticism), we're saving the wonderful Lord of the Rings movies until after we've finished the entire book. It's even better that way, as our world-building can take place entirely in our heads. We talk about it a lot, reference it to each other, the kids and I have been known to invent Lord of the Rings fanfiction, and basically it's just given us a very large common reference point in interests and conversation. I highly recommend it as a family read-aloud.



The younger kid recently re-introduced us to David Wiesner, when she brought home Mr. Wuffles and Matt and I basically snatched it out of her hands so that we could read it, too. If you have kids, you probably read him a lot when your kids were little, but then forgot about him when you stopped browsing the picture book aisles at every library visit. Well, he's still awesome, and still fun even for older kids and adults (I'd argue that he's even MORE fun for older kids and adults, because we get his sense of humor better).



Probably every kid in America has read the Warrior Cats series, which is fine, because they're awesome. They're another of the few books that the older kid still re-reads and still talks about after she's read them, so out of the thousands of books that she's read this year, you know they must be very, VERY good! This is also a good series if you've got a voracious reader, as not only are there a billion books in the series, but there are also manga and field guides, etc.

I could seriously give you dozens upon dozens more recommendations of books that we've read and enjoyed--I didn't even tell you about the Al Capone series that we love, or the Dark is Rising series that we're currently listening to in the car, or the more mature graphic novels that we let the older read with us--so feel free to comment if you want even more recommendations or something more specific. And also feel free to comment with your own and your kids' own favorites of the year, because we can ALWAYS use something new to read!