Hershey, Pennsylvania, to Easton, Pennsylvania

Did we hit all the kid-friendly factory-esque stops or what?!? The day after Hershey, we nuked some oatmeal, packed up the car, hopped in, and drove straight to Crayola Experience:

crosswalk between the parking garage and Crayola Experience

Admission is VERY expensive (thank goodness for coupons!), but to be fair, you do come home with bags full of stuff at the end, all included in the cost, including crayons in custom-designed wrappers--




--and markers that you can watch being made, complete with your choice of color combination:


There's a factory show during which you can watch a demonstration of crayons being made (including receiving one of the crayons at the end!), but everything else is hands-on:

You can paint with melted crayons--


--including your finger tips, if you're that brave, I suppose:

You can draw with glowing markers in a dark room:

You can make spin art with more melted crayons in a complicated (and often broken, a docent admitted to me) wax melting and paper plate spinning machine:

Figuring out how to recreate this project is a new obsession of mine.

You can paint in a sunny spot--




--and,  in case you're worried that you'll have to carry around a wet painting all day, you can send it through the dryer:

You can make various craft projects (a puzzle and a treasure box, on the day that we were there):

You can make yourself into a coloring page--




--and color it to make yourself look funny--


--or your sister:

I'm framing this picture that Sydney colored of Willow. 

I'm probably not framing this one of Sydney that Willow colored.

You can decorate sculptures with dry erase markers:

And if you've got any leftover tokens, you can exchange them for Model Magic:

I splurged on a couple of more complicated kits for the girls to put together at my friend's place later.

Thank goodness that the Crayola Experience also had tons of active, gross motor activities, too. I possibly have two of the more crafts-oriented kids on the planet, but I doubt that they could sit around for a full day doing nothing but art activities. Now, a couple of art activities, a visit to the two-storey indoor playground--

--a couple of art activities, a trip outdoors for a picnic lunch and a good climb all over the crayon statues, a couple of art activities, an art activity that also involves running around and playing with your art--

--a couple of art activities, some time messing around with some big, open-ended manipulatives--

--a couple of art activities, a while goofing around on the interactive floor--

(we stayed in this room for a LONG time, until Willow could predict the cycling of each of the different programs, and could master each one)

--a couple of final art activities, a trip to the gift shop, where Sydney bought a Tinkerbell coloring book and I bought Twistables, Model Magic, and purple bubbles, a trip to the bathroom, and a walk to the car, where I got the girls settled, made sandwiches and passed out fruit and strawberry milk and granola bars, called my friend to get his address, programmed it into the GPS, fiddled with the GPS for an excruciatingly long time until I could make it route me around New York City, discovered that I couldn't find my planner, looked for my planner, called Matt to ask if he could call our last hotels and ask about the planner, and then finally remembered that the garage had one of those walk-up kiosks to pay for your parking, which it had probably been at least twenty minutes since I had visited, and if I didn't book it they'd probably make me pay even more to get out of the place.

Next stop: New Haven, and the Yale Peabody Museum!

Crayola Crayon Encaustic Art

This is the one project guaranteed to get my girlies excited again about their old, broken crayons! We've melted and remolded crayons so often that that's not really new anymore, and they both know that if they wheedle enough I'll hand them a brand-new box of crayons for their art activities, so you might guess that our tub of old crayons is a large tub, indeed.

Encaustic art is the art of dripping wax onto canvas. In other words--it uses up crayons! If your canvas is sturdy, if your work area is covered, if your hair isn't hanging in your face and your sleeves aren't drooping over your hands, if your crayons are long-ish and so is your candle, and if your children can follow simple instructions, then seriously, there is no reason on this earth not to hand the kiddos a lit candle and let them go to town.

First, you'll need to unwrap yourselves a goodly number of Crayola crayons:

I'm recommending Crayola crayons not because they pay me to (I wish), but instead because I know that this project works with Crayola crayons, because that's what we use. Wax will catch fire at a certain temperature, and while I am certain, from personal experience, that you can hold a Crayola crayon to a lit candle and it will not catch on fire, I am not prepared to make the same claim about that three-pack of crayons that your kid scored at the steakhouse last night.

Unwrap a large number of crayons, because encaustic wax art uses them up quickly, and it's a drag to stop in the middle of your work and have to unwrap more crayons. Also, a shortage could tempt you to continue using your crayons even as they're growing too short to be used safely, and that would be a mistake.

Lay a canvas on your work table, and make sure that your child is at a comfortable height over the work table. Establish to your own level of comfort that your child will obey your instructions, will work calmly, will stop working if told to do so, and will not jerk away if you lay a guiding hand on her. If you're not sure that this will be the case, I'd suggest that you save encaustic art for another time. Go melt and remold your crayons instead!

Otherwise, tie your child's hair back, put her in short sleeves, and off you go!

Have your child comfortably hold a crayon in her dominant hand, keeping her hand at the very end of the crayon. Light a candle, and give it to the child to hold in her non-dominant hand. Your child should hold the candle and the crayon over her canvas and, keeping the candle and crayon either level or pointed slightly up (not down), should touch them together. The crayon will begin to melt and drip wax onto the canvas, and your child can begin to move the candle and crayon together to create her art:

Supervise to make sure that your child is touching the candle and crayon tip-to-tip, and that the candle is not pointed down (which would put the flame close to your child's fingers), or that the candle and crayon aren't pointed sharply up (which would cause the wax to drip down them onto your child's fingers). If you see your child beginning to do these things, then correct her in a calm voice, or by gently guiding her hands with yours. Don't shout or do anything to startle your child, and end the activity if she begins to get goofy with the materials.

Your child can switch colors whenever she chooses, to add to her artwork:

The more decorated the canvas is, the easier it is to appreciate the beauty of the dropped wax:

Notice how long the crayon is here:

You don't want to let the crayon get too short, or the child's fingers will get too close to the flame.

Sydney is four, and so I hung out at her elbow for the entire two hours that she worked, intently focused on her art. Willow, however, is six, and has excellent form:

 I didn't tell the girls that the majority of encaustic art is really about manipulating that wax once it's on the canvas, but Will nevertheless did some experimentation:

 After a while, we ran out of my cheap-o candles (must remember to add them to the shopping list!), and since the girls were enjoying themselves so heartily, I sighed a what-the-hell sigh and brought out the much nicer beeswax candles for them to use:

 Willow fell in love with the sweet scent of the beeswax candles and covered canvas after canvas only in beeswax candle drippings, calling them her "Smell Paintings":

 And so behold! Encaustic art in all its glory:

It's a little over-exposed because I hate my scanner, but you get the idea. Stay tuned, for I am mounting an exhibition of encaustic art canvases on the wall directly above the stereo cabinet--you'll want to come to the opening reception, I'm sure.

Homeschool Art History: Frida Kahlo and Political Art

 

Art history isn't something that has its own curriculum on the kids' homeschool high school transcripts. Instead, at least so far, it's something that we've done as unit studies, and then I've incorporated those studies into whatever syllabus best fits it. For Will, all of her high school art studies, both hands-on and history/appreciation activities, are included as a 1-credit Fine Arts class on her transcript, and the syllabus includes details of each activity and resources used, written after the fact based on what was actually accomplished.

Syd will have numerous Fine Arts classes on her high school transcript, and it's my hope that one of them will, indeed, be Art History, although for that to be a credit that stands on its own we'll have to conduct a more thorough, extensive study at some point.

Until then, we study the art that interests the kids, as it catches their interest. And recently, that was Frida Kahlo, inspired by the Mexico study that was, itself, inspired by our Girl Scout troop's Spring Break cruise.

As we often do when we start a completely new unit of study, we started our Frida Kahlo unit with a selection of picture books. You know that expression--"Explain it to me like I'm five?" Picture books are meant to offer digestible explanations in an appealing manner, often exploring a topic through a unique lens meant to engage and inspire.

Both of these books were excellent introductions to the basics of Kahlo's life and works:

• Portrait of an Artist: Frida Kahlo
• Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World

I've been trying to relearn some of my Spanish this year, so the kids also let me read to them from this awesome book:

• Frida Kahlo y Sus Animalitos

So many animal names to look up and learn! Clearly, my college Spanish classes focused on the wrong things...

Part of the work for this study was creating activities to teach younger Girl Scouts about Frida Kahlo for our Girl Scout troop's World Thinking Day kit, so the kids chose their favorite Frida Kahlo paintings, and I used Google Image searches to find and download high-quality jpegs of them and printed them two to a page on cardstock. I try to remember to do this with all the images we study, whether they're paintings, photos, sculpture, or whatever. They come in endlessly handy for comparison and review, they make your Timeline game even bigger and better, and it's awesome how often they come in handy to build context in a different study. 

And because every good Girl Scout activity includes a craft, the kids of COURSE had to test out these Frida Kahlo paper dolls:

Beyond the picture books and paper dolls, the kids and I LOVED this American Experience documentary on Frida Kahlo:

It's a surprisingly exciting ride, with shocking moments, plot twists, stunning revelations, and a strong female lead! And it answers the question of Was Frida Kahlo The Most Epic Person To Ever Have Lived? with a resounding...

OMG yes. Hard yes. All. The. Yes.

Once we were all devoted Frida Kahlo fangirls, I wanted the kids to have some practice analyzing her art. We'd also been talking separately about different methods of political protest, from flipping off the people who harass visitors to our local Planned Parenthood to participating in a march to support abortion rights, etc., so it seemed like a good chance to use Frida Kahlo as an example of how gender affects political speech, the kinds of political issues relevant to gender issues, and how personal speech can conflate with political speech to empower both.

We did a similar study of political speech in racial justice a couple of years ago, so this unit also builds upon that one.

For this study, we focused more overtly on the definition of political art, and examples of the main types of political art:

I borrowed heavily from the PBS LearningMedia lesson on The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo for this, including borrowing the second page of this student handout for the kids to use to organize their work. 

For their culminating project in this study, I assigned the kids each a selection of Kahlo pieces, and other pieces like Shepard Fairey's Obama graphic, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, a mural that's locally infamous for including a KKK cross burning, and that lost Diego Rivera mural, and asked the kids to thoughtfully categorize each piece as personal or a specific type of political, justifying their conclusions with evidence. I wouldn't necessarily say that I agreed with all of their categorizations, but they did back up their claims with evidence!

If we'd wanted to carry this study further, the kids could have used that worksheet as the basis for any number of essays, or they could have created their own personal-as-political self portraits or political art of any category. We might do some political art, anyway, as the kids have expressed interest in coming with me to the next Bans Off Our Bodies Block Party, and obviously they can't go without excellent protest signs!

I was happy, though, for the kids to simply accomplish my main learning objectives for them: 1) to fall in love with Frida Kahlo, and 2) to widen their understanding of how we, particularly as women, can express ourselves politically in this patriarchal culture. 

Ooh, how awesome would a Frida Kahlo-themed protest sign be?!? 

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?

Homeschool High School Honors World History: DIY Art History Artwork Cards

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times course uses an AP World History textbook, a college-level art history textbook, and all the other additional resources you'd want in order to flesh the study of ancient history out into a full-year high school honors course.

Among the other many resources I've compiled and DIYed for this study, one of my favorites is the new set of DIY artwork cards that I prepare for every new chapter of Gardner's Art through the Ages, which in turn I've keyed to the relevant chapter(s) in Duiker's World History. 

Artwork cards are a major component of a couple of different pedagogical approaches to homeschooling, and you CAN buy sets of them--Memoria Press is generally considered to have the nicest, if you're in the market. But if you buy sets of them you're not going to get exactly the artworks that you want in the sizes that you want, and depending on where you buy them, copyright can be an issue. 

Another option, one that I also use, is buying museum gift shop postcards. I LOVE my sets of artwork postcards, and it's nice because they're always high-quality, I know they're not pirated, and I didn't have to do any of the work of sourcing, printing, and cutting out the images. But they're hard to buy online, and they're pricey! I would NOT have the collection of artwork cards that I do if I was paying a buck-plus for each of them. I mean, geez, my kid is going through twenty or so of these cards per chapter in just her current study! And that's not even counting the separate political art or history of photography studies that we've completed fairly recently, yikes.

So you've got options, but if you want the highest-quality, cheapest, most bespoke sets of artwork cards, you probably want to DIY them like I do. 

Step 1: Go through the study materials and select the images you require. 

I always pre-read the kid's textbook chapters so that I can collect additional resources and set up extension activities anyway, so while I'm reading her art history textbook I also note the artworks that are referred to in that chapter. Occasionally, there are also a couple that her history textbook refers to that the art history textbook doesn't, or I might want to collect different types of images referenced there, like the cuneiform tablets from the Mesopotamia chapter, or the Neolithic stoneworks from the Ancient Great Britain section. 

Step 2: Find the images online and save them.

There are three ways to find good images online. First is just to do a Google Image search and filter the results for Large images:

This is a screenshot from when I was collecting images for our History of Photography study, but the process is identical.

You'll often come across pirated images this way, but you're not using your images commercially, so I'll allow it, ahem. 

Another good way is a Wikipedia search, especially for more iconic artworks. You won't get any pirated images here, but you WILL get some lower-quality images, as many will be photos that contributors took themselves of the artworks in their museum settings. 

And then ANOTHER good way is to go directly to the website of the museum that hosts a particular artwork. A lot of museums do offer free downloads of digital images of many of their artworks. My special favorite is the British Museum, which will often let me download an image so high-quality that I can print it life-sized--I've done that for both the Rosetta stone and for several cuneiform and hieroglyphic pieces, and it's so cool and useful for detailed study! 

Here's one list of museums that offer open-source images, but it's definitely not comprehensive because the British Museum isn't even on it. 

Here's the British Museum's image site; I usually download or request the super-high-quality images, because why not! Wouldn't some large-scale Greek vase images look so awesome framed and displayed in my future Life of Theseus-themed bathroom?

Here's the Metropolitan Museum of Art's image site. I like that if you're not looking for a specific artwork, but rather a time period or style, you can filter your results by open-access so that everything you see is obtainable.

The National Gallery's image site provides open-access images and also provides many of the Wikimedia images. 

Here's the National Trust images site. Only some of these images are free, but there are images that work very well with British history and geography studies. 

The Smithsonian's image site pulls from all its museums and holdings across genres, so it's a great resource not just for art, but also historical artifacts and even primary sources. 

Step 3: Print and cut.

I prefer to print my images with a laser printer onto cardstock, because I want them to look and feel nice. To make the artwork cards a standard size, I print them four to a page--

--then cut them on a guillotine paper cutter:

I label the back with title, artist, date, and, for these art history cards, geographic location, and currently I have them filed by textbook chapter.

My teenager is also keeping a comprehensive ancient history timeline, so I print another set of these images as thumbnails onto regular copy paper, and then she glues them into her timeline and labels them. 

Okay, so how do you actually USE these artwork cards? There are so many ways!

• Flash cards. Memorize the artwork, title, artist, date, and geographic location to add to one's working knowledge of art history. Having a ton of artworks memorized will make it easier for you to slot future pieces into your memory, and allow you to build context and make better comparisons/contrasts, add to your understanding of social history, and write some kick-ass essays, etc.
• Sort and organize. Having these visuals at hand allows you to easily make comparisons about style and other features of artworks that may be less noticeable when each image is trapped in the pages of a specific chapter of your textbook. How do the early Native American earthworks compare to Neolithic European ones? How does portraiture vary, and how would you sort portraits stylistically when the images are separated from geohistorical context? 
• Order chronologically. We play a lot of history card games in which we have to try to put something in chronological order. We have almost all of these Timeline games, but you can play the same game with art, and not only is it interesting, but it builds a chronological understanding of art on a sensory level.
• Display. Once upon a time, a worker who was doing emergency repairs on our old, poorly-maintained, homeowner's special home came out of the kids' bathroom after installing a new toilet and asked me if I homeschooled. I was all, "Yes?" I thought it was the weirdest, most random thing for someone to figure out about me with zero evidence! But when I told this story to the kids later, they were immediately all like, "Um, it's because you tape educational posters to the wall facing the toilet?" Because riiiiight... when I want the kids to memorize something but I don't want to go through the emotional torment of MAKING them memorize something, I just print that thing out onto 8.5"x11" paper and tape it to the wall facing their toilet. I also once put tape onto ALL our things and made the kids label them in French and that's all still around, and every once in a while I printed out and assembled a giant line map of someplace we were studying, made them label that, too, and then hung it in the hallway until I was ready to make them study some other place. I also use pushpins to make little clotheslines across our bookshelves and I have the kids clothespin these art cards to them, and sometimes I'll display them on our magnet boards. I thought I was being sneaky like this, but apparently I wasn't, lol!

I should probably act like, since these images cost only the amount of the paper and the ink, and they're just cardstock, I'll recycle them when my last homeschooling kid graduates in a couple of months, but you know I won't. I won't have the kids to label me new giant maps for the hallway, so perhaps I'll retire them all permanently on display there!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!