Homeschool Book Review: Three-Dimensional Art Adventures

You might have noticed that I don't often have art as a subject in our weekly lesson plans. Primarily, that's because Matt has an art degree and he gives the children an art lesson every weekend. I consider them to be private art lessons, thriftily outsourced!

I do like to do art with the kids, but I don't consider myself skilled enough to prepare my own lessons, so I really appreciate packaged lessons that include study of an artwork and a hands-on extension. I have several of those kinds of resources in my Homeschool: The Arts pinboard, my favorite of which is this site with leveled art history studies. I especially like to incorporate those lessons into our other studies--we used the lesson on Daniel French, for instance, in our study of the Lincoln Memorial.

The other way that I like to use art lessons, if I don't have an academic context to put them in, is as a fun weekend activity to do with the kids. We spend a ton of time together during the school week doing projects, so you'd think that the last thing that we'd want to do on a weekend is sit down for another project, but it seems new and different, somehow, when it's not also a task to be checked off of a work plan.

That *kind of* explains why I received Three-Dimensional Art Adventures for free from a publicist back in July, and I'm only just now ready to write about it. I made note of the most promising activities, then put the book in with my other resources, and when the time was right for a particular activity, there it was, ready and waiting for us!

I think the kids' favorite of the activities that we tried is the "trick hand." The lesson began with a study of From the Knees of My Nose to the Belly of My Toes, which the kids found fascinating, then guided us through the creation of our own "tricky" piece:

I can't tell which one, but underneath Will's drawing is for sure one of those LEGO books I was telling you about yesterday!

Does it annoy you to try to draw or write on a picnic table? We do it all summer, and it bugs the crap out of me! Painting boards are on my long-term to-do list.

This is when the magic happens!

Everyone's turned out really well, although we all figured out ways to make the effect even better next time (use a ruler to draw the straight lines, elaborate the curve on the curvy lines, make the lines as close together as we can, etc.), so it's still an activity that's repeatable.

Another week, during our shark unit, the kids became fascinated with the clean, streamlined silhouette of the shark, and so I took that opportunity to introduce the "Capturing Simplicity" lesson. It began with a study of a sculpture from Ancient Greece (and now I'm putting that down in my Greek mythology lesson plans to look at again when we study Hermes!), and continued with our own simple, sculpted silhouettes:

I don't know why I didn't photograph Will's, but she did her first initial. It looks really cool!

The tutorial calls for air-dry clay and paint, but we used Sculpey, and it worked perfectly.

I've often wanted to create some sort of cataloging and indexing system for myself, to use with my homeschooling resources. I have tons of print and digital resources, and when I create unit studies, I'm always flipping through every single thing, adding a reading from here and an activity from there. I mean, just in this book alone, the artwork studied ranges from Ancient Greece to modern, geographically circles the world, covers a huge variety of themes, and uses materials from nuts and bolts to pen and paper to fabric to floral wire.

Next on my to-do list from the book: the collage lesson, just because it's been ages since the kids and I have done collages together (and I have a bunch of random materials that I've been saving up and would love to get used up!), and the lesson on sculpting movement using floral wire as the medium.

Because Hermes!

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!