Posted by Cindy on March 29, 2010
A local museum offers classes a few times a year that are always lots of fun! The theme this time was butterfly batiks. It was such a great springtime art project, I thought I’d share it with you. I’ll take you through the steps below, but you’ll be looking at three different butterflies since I was snapping shots of all three of my children during the class.
1. Cut out a symmetrical butterfly figure by folding a large piece of paper in half, cutting on the fold and opening again. After observing photos of real butterflies, use oil pastels to color the butterfly heavily. Leave some white space for the wax resist in the next step.
2. Place the colored butterfly in a tub of water and crinkle it up. Shake off the excess water and place the wet butterfly flat on a paper towel. Paint watered down black tempera paint over the entire surface of the butterfly.
3. Use a dry paper towel to blot over the painted butterfly to remove excess paint and water. The result is a wax resist where the black paint clings to the paper, but not the oil pastels.
4. Finally, paste the butterfly on a large piece of paper where your child has drawn a habitat.
Fun! And a great extension to a nature study outing!
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Filed Under: Art
Posted by Cindy on March 27, 2010
We spent much of our month with Matisse completing art with scissors since Matisse’s later works were often collages or realistic and abstract art constructed from cuttings.
The artwork below was actually harder than it looks. I asked the kids to use rulers to measure the desired sized blocks of color for the background. The abstract pieces placed on top were folded, cut and opened so that each piece would be symmetrical. (See, I hide math everywhere!)
Henri Matisse
Olga’s Gallery
Warning: There are many nudes!
Paintings We Studied
I chose these paintings by Matisse because we were studying erosion at the time during nature study. Each of the paintings includes erosion of some sort. We had fun looking for and drawing erosion during our nature walks. These painting ideas and the nature walk ideas came from the Everchanging Erosion NaturExplorers unit.
Open Window
Luxembourg Gardens
La Moulade
The Bank
Lesson Ideas
KinderArt Lessons
Paper Collages
Mulit-Media Design
Posted by Cindy on
Johannes Brahms Composer Study Resources
Classics For Kids
Bio for Kids
Posted by Cindy on
I hate to admit that our study of the 50′s and 60′s was a bit more boring than the 20th century thus far. It’s partly because the gusto of school is waning as we see the end in sight, and partly because we covered most of this previously when we vacationed in Alabama last November.
So, besides time lines, continuing our lapbook activities, lots of reading and a documentary or two, we didn’t do anything exciting. We’re lumping together the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s and noteable events of the 21st century as we try to wrap up this last history study of the school year.
1950′s and 60′s Resources
Posted by Cindy on March 24, 2010
We’ve been on the hunt for signs of erosion this month during our nature walks – and what a treasure we found! KY is known to have several cave systems because of the large amount of limestone rock that makes up the foundation. We also live near a large creek, have found many springs on the farm, and have located several sinkholes. We even found a cave dwelling salamander once! All these are signs of caves.
In an area of sinkholes that we’ve observed before, we found this site last week.
I’m sure it doesn’t look like much from the picture, but the hole in the background is new this year and it goes as far as the eye can see!
You’ll just have to trust me that the hole goes REALLY deep! The sinkholes have only been visible in this area for a couple of years, but the erosion seems to be moving quickly. Let’s just hope my husband doesn’t accidentally drive over them in the tractor! I love finding such an exciting phenomenon, but I’d rather not lose my husband to the depths of the earth!
Below are the erosion resources we used this month.
I just posted about our latest fungus walk, too, over at Shining Dawn Books. As we were looking for signs of erosion, the abundance of fungi was amazing!
