Earth Art Project

During our study of space we did an art project of Earth using shaving cream and paint. It was quite simple, lots of fun, and turned out so well!

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To begin all you need is a can of shaving cream, blue and green paint, toothpicks, white circles (heavier paper such as cardstock), a cake tin (or equivalent to hold the shaving cream), and ruler (or something with a sharp{ish} edge).

 You begin by spraying and spreading your shaving cream around in your container of choice.

 Squirt your paint in any quantity and pattern you desire.

 Take a toothpick and mix your paint around. You can mix as much as you like, but it does work a little better to leave some white and not mix the colors together completely.

Shaving cream after mixing

 Once your colors are satisfactorily mixed with the shaving cream you place a white circle on top of the paint and press down. We discovered you do need to press down sufficiently to guarantee the entire circle picks up paint. Otherwise you end up with blank spaces that are not as pretty when the project is complete.

 After you have placed your circles in the shaving cream and paint you need to let it dry for a few minutes. 

 Finally you take a ruler and scrape (not too hard!) the excess shaving cream off the circles and here is what you can expect from your finished Earth!

 I loved how well this turned out and highly recommend this art project. The only thing I did was cut out the circles (thank you Creative Memories circle cutters) and scrape off the shaving cream. It is a super kid friendly project and turns out basically no matter what you/they do! Here are the girls with their Earths.

Thanks again Pinterest! If you're interested in more details, here is my original source: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/53480314298363321/ .

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In other news... While the big kids were doing this project Tim was feeding McKinley. Things don't usually get quite this messy, but Tim joked I needed to take a picture and title it "What I look like when Daddy feeds me..." Poor Daddy! lol :)

First Day of Classical Conversations - 2013

The Monday after Labor Day, we began Classical Conversations. While we have been doing a lot of the CC work since late last winter/early spring and throughout the summer (as well as play dates with our CC friends) we hadn't had the opportunity to attend the classes. The girls were both very excited to begin our official Classical Conversations school year.

Jackson and McKinley weren't quite so excited but had the opportunity to tag along anyway... :)

 Ready with new backpacks from Grammy 

  We did class pictures for the yearbook the first day (and since I took them I decided to include my munchkin's pictures in this post :). Reagan is 6 1/2 yrs old and in the first grade. Kennedy is nearly 5 and in Kindergarten. 

  Jackson, 3 years old, and McKinley, 6 1/2 months old, get to chill out in the nursery class and at home participate in projects as they wish. We are working on preschool work with Jackson this year. We are currently focusing on recognizing letters and numbers. Miss McKinley is working on being the cutest and happiest baby around and doing quite a good job if I do say so myself! :)

 I spent some time in Kennedy's class the first morning and was able to take a couple of pictures of her work. I was impressed with how well she was able to trace the continents since we had never tried this at home. She also did a great job of identifying each of the continents and oceans during an M&M game (on the table). 

 I was completely amazed by this bird she drew. Her teacher provided some instructions but she did this entirely on her own. Missy K is becoming quite the artist and I also have to say quite good at listening to and following directions when we're doing schoolwork or projects.

One of the reasons I have been looking forward to joining Classical Conversations is the weekly science experiments the classes do together. The teacher leads the students through each experiment using the Scientific Method (purpose, hypothesis, material, procedure, results and conclusions). So far I have been very impressed with this aspect of the classroom instruction the girls receive. Here is Missy K working on making her hypothesis as well as recording the results.

 This was such a great demonstration of the speed required of satellites in orbit. In this experiment the tree was the sun, the teacher was the earth and Missy K was the moon. As you can probably tell the moon has to move significantly faster than the earth in order to stay in orbit.

 I didn't get to spend as much time in Reagan's classroom the first day, but I did get there near the end to see part of the review. The kids loved playing a version of "Headbands" with the Timeline cards. They had to ask each other questions in order to determine what they had on their head. For example Creation & the Fall, The Flood & the Tower of Babel, Mesopotamia & Sumer, Egyptians, Indus River Valley Civilization, and Minoans & Mycenaeans were some of the choices. Reagan had the Minoans & Mycenaeans on her head and she figured it out when it was her turn. Way to go Miss Reagan! :)

  It appears our first day completely wore out my two little snuggle bunnies. :) These two don't actually sleep together, but Tim wasn't home and McKinley wasn't asleep when Jackson was ready to go to bed and he wanted me to snuggle with him. The three of us lay down together and I simply couldn't resist this photo op when to my surprise they both fell asleep. They were too precious and sweet sleeping snuggling together with their little arms crossed and pacis in their mouths. :) 

We had a great first day at Classical Conversations and are so looking forward to participating with this Homeschool group for many years to come.

Making Paint

The book "Discovering Great Artists" by MaryAnn F. Kohl and Kim Solga is used and recommended by Classical Conversations. I like the book both because of the projects and the information provided on the mediums and artists who would have used them. 

 I had heard from friends about a particular project where you made your paints and so we decided to give it a try for our first project. The first step was to use a rock to grind colored chalk into powder.

 Next we separated one egg yolk and white per color

 Then we mixed the egg yolks with 2 teaspoons of water per yolk until it was frothy

 Finally we added the egg mixture to our ground chalk to make our paint

 These were our three finished products. We should have considered how the yellow yolk would effect our final colors during our initial selection process. Oops! I guess you live and learn!

 The pinky/orange color was definitely the best and most preferred color for painting. Here are my little artists hard at work. :)

Here is part of the description provided in the book on the artist Giotto (ZHEE-O-TO) and this project which I found particularly interesting:

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"Many paintings of Giotto's time were made with egg tempera paint on special panels of wood. There were no art stores, so each artist had to make paint by grinding minerals, clay, berries, or even insects into fine powder and mixing this pigment with egg yolk and water. Egg tempera makes a thin, fast drying coat of bright color. The paint is very strong and long lasting. Giotto's beautiful egg tempera paintings are over 700 years old!"

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If you're looking for a fun as well as educational book to help plan art projects for your kids I would recommend checking this book out.



Reagan & Kennedy's Many Colored Coats

The first part of our week studying the Jewish people was spent primarily learning about Abraham, Sarah and Issac. The second part of the week was spent learning about Joseph and his family. We learned about his many colored coat and how and why he was sent to Egypt to serve Pharaoh. I really like how sequentially and logically "The Story of the World" is laid out. There weren't any parts of the stories of Abraham, Issac, Jacob or Joseph that were new to me. Having said that, I had never in my years of Sunday School or formal education made the connection myself that Abraham is Joseph's great-grandfather. I love history and feel relatively well read but because history was not taught to me sequentially I wonder how many connections I will make as we progress through these books that have never occurred to me before. I thought it was interesting to discover the direct connection between Abraham and Joseph and just another example of why I like this curriculum so much! 

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One of the suggested activities for the week was making Joseph's many colored coat. There were several ideas on how to do this and we chose to improvise with products we had readily available. We started by cutting and then painting the oversized paper Grandma and Grandpa gave us for Easter. The girls had a great time selecting their colors and painting such a large sheet of paper. This picture reminds me of a favorite saying of Anne from the Anne of Green Gables series; there was plenty of "scope for the imagination" in this painting project! :)

 

 Reagan decided to do long vertical stripes in the order of the rainbow. Kennedy has been really big into creating patterns lately so she surprised me a little by choosing to do randomly colored horizontal lines. Both girls did a great job of being careful and creating colorful coats.

 I asked Reagan to smile in this picture but she was not at all pleased with the finished product. She liked her rainbow coat but was upset there were no sleeves. So much for my improvising...

 Kennedy on the other hand thought her coat turned out great and was as happy as a little clam with my improvisation! As a matter of fact she is still playing with her coat a week later. :)

The girl's favorite book from this week was "The Coat of Many Colors" by Jenny Koralek (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2004).