Restoration Place

Art Curriculum ~ ARTistic Pursuits

We recently discovered ARTistic Pursuits art curriculum by Brenda Ellis (home educating parent and professional artist) and now that we've done a few lessons, I've got to tell you about it.

We're using one book from each of the two different levels: Grades K-3, Book One: An Introduction to the Visual Arts and Grades 4-6, Book One: The Elements of Art and Composition. I use the first one with my 4-, 6-, 8-year-olds, and my 11-year-old uses the second book independently, though she likes to join in with the others' art lessons and projects.

Here's Book One: The Elements of Art and Composition for grades 4-6:

 

It includes 64 lessons in 16 units, and each unit is divided into four lessons: Building a Visual Vocabulary, American Art Appreciation and History, Techniques, and Application. Maggie (11) reads and completes the lessons on her own, averaging about two per week. Maggie feels her drawing is greatly improving, and she's thrilled with the results!

 

She can't remember which lesson the cat drawing was for (we must get better at marking and organizing her drawings) but it's a big change from the way she used to draw her cat, a favorite subject.

The book I'm using with the younger children, Grades K-3, Book One: An Introduction to the Visual Arts (forgot to take a photo of that one) has 32 lessons. Each lesson includes a short introduction that I read to the children (5-10 minutes each), observing and talking about an artwork by a master (included), then an art project which takes us about 30 minutes. From start to finish, it takes about one hour. We do one lesson each week. It's very easy to use and fun! That's counts for something with this homeschooling mama. ~smile~ Every time I say, "Art time!" they cheer.

But the best part of all is to hear my child say, "Mom, look! I'm really doing this! I really made it!" I've been hearing that a lot while using ARTistic Pursuits.

One final thought: Ideally, I'd love to enroll my children in an in-person art class taught by a professional. I can't make that work for us right now, so I'm extra pleased to be able to offer experiences in art through this curriculum.

Clouds Mini Unit

 

 

We've been doing a lot of cloud watching and identifying lately. When we made the simple mirror nephoscope we intended to continue our cloud study. But we moved on to to other interests, instead.

We picked the cloud study back up again and for the last two weeks or so, we've been obsessed with clouds. Katie, especially. She brings her cloud indentification sheet everywhere we go and and calls out the names of the clouds she sees. She's been our official go-to person for daily cloud information.

A couple of the children's favorite activities were making a cloud in a jar and recreating artists' clouds.

The cloud in a jar was fascinating. The supplies are a gallon glass jar (the bigger the jar, the more dramatic the results), matches, black paper, tape, food coloring (to color the water), large plastic baggie (to be filled with ice):

Fill the jar 1/3 full of hot water and put a few drops of food coloring in. Tape black paper to the back half of the jar. This helps to see the cloud better:

  

Fill the large plastic baggie with ice:

Light a match, and hold it inside the jar above the water level for a few seconds to heat the air and create smoke particles. Drop the match into the water and immediately place the bag of ice across the top of the jar:

 

The cloud forms, and it's thrilling!

 

 

 

They also enjoyed a Clouds in Art project which I merged with Lapaz Home Learning's Cloud Kit (scroll down in the post to see the cloud kit) (Thanks, Theresa!). 

We set up different shades of blue (and some white) card stock and cotton balls:

 

Next, we printed and cut out the small Clouds in Art paintings:

 

The children each took several "paintings" and tried to recreate the artists' clouds:

 

Some other great resources we used were those shared by Melissa at In the Sparrow's Nest. Melissa's Cloud Unit Study is very thorough--in fact, we're not done exploring her ideas. The strawberries dipped in chocolate will be next! (Thanks again, Melissa!)

We might do the Clouds in Art Mini Unit Study Notebooking Page Set offered by Amanda at Hearts and Trees. We ordered and enjoyed her Winter 2007 kit.

By the way, our cloud study wasn't generated by our science curriculum--it's one of our many rabbit trails and we plan to follow it as far as we want.

American Visionary Art Museum ~ Visit

We visited the American Visionary Art Museum yesterday. The museum has been designated by Congress as America's museum for self-taught art, so I had been expecting a unique experience. I've been eager to explore the museum ever since we relocated to the greater Baltimore area, so off we went on a rainy afternoon to find out about it.

Most of the art my children enjoyed was on the museum building itself or located on its grounds. The mirror mosaics were stunning!

The sculpture courtyard was a lot of fun:

 

The 8-foot-high Cosmic Space Egg--a favorite!

Bird and nest:

 

Walking through the museum entrance hallway...isn't it beautiful?

 

 

Taking photos beyond the entrance inside the museum isn't permitted, so I can't show you what we saw.

The best of the art is fun and funky--like the 10-foot long model of the Lusitania made from 193,000 matchsticks; the rest of it was too raw, dark, and provocative for my young, sensitive children. Some of the images were even disturbing and frightening and before passing by them I had to have my children look away.

It would have been very helpful to have warnings of graphic content posted so I could have had a chance to turn around and go back the way we had come, rather than trying to quickly hustle my children past something I myself didn't care to see.

Unfortunately, we were only able to visit two galleries before I decided we had had enough. A peek into some of the other galleries made very clear to me that we didn't need to experience the rest of the museum.

We even decided to skip the museum store, though we love museum stores, and my children had been looking forward to it. I glanced in and saw too much that my children just didn't need to experience.

I'm disappointed that our first experience with visionary art seems so...tainted.

Here's my suggestion to the American Visionary Art Museum: post warnings about art that may be unsuitable for children, set aside an exhibit hall with child-friendly visionary art, well away from the disturbing adult-oriented art. Revamp the museum store so the provocative items are separate from the family-friendly fare.

Until then, we'll stay outside in the courtyard and sculpture gardens.

Puffy Paint

We finally tried puffy paint. It's been so long since I first found out about it and I've had the recipe in my head for so long, I don't know who to give credit to ~smile~. It's sort of like homemade playdough or salt dough--common kitchen play recipes in the public mom domain.

The recipe is simple: mix equal parts of flour, salt, and water, and then color the mixture with food coloring or tempera/poster paint (I think acrylic would work great, too). I used six cups of each ingredient because I needed the larger quantity for four children.

Since I had forgotten to get squeeze tubes or bottles to load the puffy paint into, we used large paint brushes, which worked fine.

I separated the mixture into glasses and put some paint in each glass (sorry about the blurry quality of some of the photos; my camera battery was on the verge of dying again):

 

It was fun to glop the paint onto the card stock and swirl it around:

 

 

 

  

At least one of us had their own idea about what to do with puffy paint:

Once I saw how gloppy the paint was, I loaded the paper onto cookie sheets. That made transferring the art to the drying place much easier:

We all loved trying puffy paint and are thinking about possible variations--fluorescent paint, metallic/glitter paint, using different surfaces, and even varying the mixture with cornmeal or other additives to change the consistency.

Visual Homemaking Journal

A while back, I started a new journal for myself: a visual homemaking journal. I was inspired by Ann at Holy Experience's beautiful examples, as well as my good friend Deb at As We Walk's encouragement that I could muster the creativity to do it.

So I gave it a try. I think I'm going to like this! Here it is displayed in a clear Lucite cookbook holder in the kitchen where I'll be able to glance at it as I'm going about my work. I think propping it up like this might just keep me on track with obligations and remind me to do the fun things that bring so much life to our home and family:

  

On the left page I've scribbled some of the daily and weekly to-do items:

And on the right page, a simple collection of ideas for my home--all torn from a catalog:

It's not perfectly planned or put together. It's kind of slapped together and I think it'll have to be that way most of the time as I don't want to devote the time it would take to make it more polished.

Mexican Metal Tooling

Inspired by Pepper Paints and KinderArt examples of Mexican metal tooling, we decided to try making our own. We gathered heavy-duty disposable baking pans, permanent markers, objects to use for embossing such as spoons, large hardware nails, etc., and a thick plastic shower curtain liner to protect the table:

 

First, I cut the aluminum into rectangles:

 

This was tricky because the aluminum edges were a little sharp. Had I thought of it, I could have used our large paper cutter and spared myself a few nicks from the edges.

Then we began "drawing" pictures and designs on the rectangles:

 

Then we colored the pictures:

 

We were very happy with the results and discussed different ways to display the pictures. We liked the traditional "collage" arrangement with dangling beads on the bottom (see above link examples) but decided to do something different. We clipped the pictures to the backyard fence in one long row:

 

 

 

The children want to make some more, so maybe we'll wire the next set together and dangle some pretty beads at the bottom. But for now, we're very pleased with our backyard art.

Mini Batik Project

Making mini batik squares with our Hands and Hearts Ancient Far East Discovery Kit isn't going to be one of our most memorable projects. I'll explain why a little later.

We prepared the supplies, which are small (3 x 4 or so) pieces of off-white muslin, white crayons, acrylic paint, cups for paint, and paper towels, and discovered there was only one crayon.

I was expecting four white crayons, as I had ordered one history kit plus three additional student kits so all four of my children would have all the necessary supplies, but there was only one. We scrambled to find two more white crayons and one white oil pastel, not that hard to do in a house full of crayons and oil pastels:

Next, the children drew a picture or design on the cloth. This required hard pressing with the crayon and holding the tiny, slippery cloth firmly at the same time, something that frustrated all but my 10-year-old:

Next, we dipped the cloths into the cups of paint, then removed them, squeezed the excess paint, and placed them on paper towels to dry:

All of them together:

Ok, now a little explanation as to why this wasn't such a great experience...

1. The pieces of muslin were so small and slippery, it was very difficult to hold them in place and press firmly with the crayon in order to make a picture or design.

2.  There was only one crayon in all four boxes. One crayon isn't enough for four children.

3. Although these kits are designed to give us a just a sampling of the "real thing" it seemed somewhat contrived to create a batik with a crayon on a tiny piece of cloth. I think a little more thought could have been put into the project so that real, melted wax could be placed on a larger piece of cloth in a way that would be both safe and fun.

4. Perhaps our memory of making a fish print with a real fish and making felt balls with real wool makes this project dim in comparison. Or maybe my own great memory of doing a batik project in elementary art class so many years ago is overshadowing this project.

5. The children had a lackluster response to the project, which began with the frustration of trying to draw a picture on the cloth. They were eager to finish up and do something else. They weren't interested in learning more about batik, India or Indonesia.

Ok, enough complaining. I'm already thinking about gathering the necessary supplies for a batik project during the summer. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes...~grin~.

Gyotaku ~ Japanese Fish Prints

I was just a little taken aback when I came across a dead fish in our Ancient Far East History Kit:

So were my children: "We're going to paint with that?" Mind you, my children really aren't squeamish, but this form of art is different from what we've done in the past.

Yet, we jumped right in with four small gray perches, paint, and brushes to learn the art of gyotaku--Japanese fish printing:

The directions stated that we were to lightly paint the fish with strokes from the tail to the head--opposite the direction of the scales:

After lightly coating the fish with paint we gently placed the delicate rice paper on top of the fish, pressing on the fish to create an imprint:

The results were lovely:

Once the prints were complete we decided to dissect one of the fish. The project directions suggested it, and we were very curious to find out about the inside of a fish:

What we were most interested in was the gills, and we got a good look at them:

Since this wasn't a dissection for which we had planned and prepared, we weren't trying to identify all that we were observing inside the fish, we were simply investigating. Plus, it got rather odorous once the fish was cut open.

Now I have three preserved fish and leftover project supplies. I offered them to a friend, but I don't think she's interested. ~smile~

Fold Fest ~ Origami

One of the children said, "Hey, Mom, when can we do origami?" I remembered that I had unpacked this from one of our Sonlight boxes (it's scheduled for Core 5):

Never mind that it's for next year, let's do it now! And we did:

Lest you think this a tidy, controllable activity or that this won't lead to further embellishment of the creations:

We quickly discovered that the mere 24 sheets of origami paper included with the manual didn't last long with four children. So the next day I bought a pack of 100 sheets and the folding went on:

Dad took his favorites with him to work this morning and the pre-breakfast folding has already begun.

Maybe I should have gotten 2 packs of 100 sheets?

 

New Journal, New Joy

Inspired by the visual homemaking journal  at Holy Experience blog, but mostly by my friend Deb who has relentlessly encouraged me with her creative ideas and insistence that I really can do something creative, I've made a first attempt at creating some sort of journal.

I'm not quite sure what the focus will be. All that matters is that I've begun!

Here's the cover of the journal. I purchased it at Barnes & Noble. I like the cover well enough to not feel the need to alter it:

Aren't the paper cutouts great? I'm grateful that I can embellish my pages with whatever is already pre-made and simply cut and glue. Otherwise, I don't think I'd ever do anything but simply write.

I think this may become a "book of days"...one that evolves over time with a changing focus. That may be homemaking, home education, personal thoughts, things the children say and do, and where we are headed in our lives.

A new place of joy!