Posted by Cindy on October 30, 2009
We’ve had a fun month studying Rodin (despite my preference for paintings over sculpture.) I’ve been rather slow posting our projects, so here are two weeks worth of projects.
After studying The Hand of God and other hand sculptures, we completed 2-dimensional abstract hand drawings. The kids simply traced their hands and used at least two different mediums to create an abstract design. I love these!
You can see the Ivory soap sculpting we did as one of the projects during our Presidents unit in this post. I didn’t get a close-up of the sculptures because they weren’t great, but you can see the small squares of Ivory soap in the two overall project pictures. They didn’t turn out as quite the masterpieces that I’d hoped, but it was fun anyway!
To end the study, we pulled out some clay and tried a little sculpting.
“Flowers in a Basket”
“The Creek”
Here are the resources that have been in the sidebar this month. I hope they’re helpful to you!
Francois Auguste-Rene Rodin
Artchive Gallery
The Thinker
Jean de Fiennes, Draped
Rose Beuret
The Hand of God
Lesson Ideas
Many Ideas for Drawing and Sculpting Hands
Posted by Cindy on September 29, 2009
We have LOVED our time spent with Rousseau, but now it’s time to move on to French sculptor, Auguste Rodin.
Henri Rousseau
Olga’s Gallery
Landscape with Cattle
View of Bridge Sevres
The Football Players
Monkeys in a Jungle
Lesson Ideas
Princeton Online – Several Ideas
KinderArt – Fantasy Jungle
Lesson Plan Page – Stained Glass
Books We Read
Don’t forget to sign up for the giveaway that takes place bright and early Thursday, October 1st!
Posted by Cindy on September 26, 2009
I am loving Henri Rousseau’s style. It’s somewhat of a folk style with lots of bright colors. Combine that with whimsical scenes and it makes me smile. So many of the artists we’ve studied have been too serious for me, but the lighter side of Rousseau has revived my artist’s eye!
Rousseau spent many days studying, sketching and painting exotic plants while visiting huge greenhouses that housed plants and trees from all over the world. These plants inspired him to paint jungle scenes. In most of his jungle scenes, you’ll find animals or people hiding in the midst of the plants. Rousseau would get his inspiration and models for many of those additions as he looked at photographs from magazines. To look at his paintings, you’d think he spent a lot of time in jungles, but not so!
Surprise
Fight Between a Tiger and a Lion
Two Monkeys in a Jungle
The Waterfall
Here are Mahayla and Caleb’s attempts at a Rousseau jungle painting…
We actually tried to pick leaves that looked jungle-like and roll over them with painted brayers to make prints, but it didn’t work very well. Instead, the kiddos just decided to paint with brushes.
Posted by Cindy on August 31, 2009
Here are the resources that have been in my sidebar for our August artist study. Henri Rousseau is in the sidebar for September
Paul Cezanne
Olga’s Gallery
The Mount Sainte-Victoire
Still-life with Apples
House and Trees
Boy in a Red Waistcoat
Lesson Ideas
Cezanne Still-life
Another Still-life Idea
Math Lesson for Older Students
Cubism Lesson
Books We’ll Read
Posted by Cindy on August 28, 2009
I admit that wildflowers are quite possibly my favorite of all nature studies. I’m always in awe of God’s creativeness, beauty and majesty through such delicate little things like wildflowers. I’m also amazed at how each season presents me with new flowers that I’ve never noticed before – each with awesome characteristics that are different from any other flower.
A field of wildflowers can move me, while a single wildflower observed closely makes me marvel at the constant, yet diverse design that makes a flower a flower. And to think that wildflowers are “planted by God” reminds me that He cares about me enough to bring me flowers!
I have posted at Shining Dawn Books about this week’s identification walk. I hope you’ll take a minute to hop over there and read An Abundance of Wildflowers as it’s somewhat of a continuation of this post.
Last week, we took a very up-close and personal look at wildflowers through comparisons and dissection. There was no long nature walk involved – only long enough to collect several flower samples to bring back inside. Since the yard wasn’t off limits for picking, the kiddos brought in a couple of flowers that aren’t considered wild. No matter, it made for a great opportunity to discuss the difference between the two!
The first activity was to compare two completely different flowers for similarities and differences. This is another of the notebooking pages that comes with the Wonderful Wildflowers NaturExplorers unit.
The second activity was flower dissection to identify all the parts of a flower.
We own a very old dissection kit that made the dissection not only easy, but exciting for the kids.
We were able to see the ovules (eggs) in the ovary on this hollyhock (not a wildflower).
Eli always gets in on the action!
The third activity was drawing the cross-section of a flower and labeling all the parts.
And the final activity was to complete a watercolor still-life of wildflowers. We have been studying Cezanne, who painted several still-life works, so this tied art and nature study together quite well. And to get composer study in the mix, we listened to a CD of Chopin (our composer of the month.)
“Wildflowers in the Rain”
