living literature

Dawn Publications

I’m in love! I’m in love! After reading LOTS (and I mean lots) of books to weed out the best of the best to include in our NaturExplorers units, I have to tell you that it’s very hard to find books that meet all my criteria: Living, interesting, inspirational Factual without being dry Don’t address…

Smithsonian’s Backyard

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to review the Smithsonian’s Backyard and Oceanic Collections. This wasn’t the first time I’d enjoyed picture books from the Smithsonian Institution as many of them had previously visited our home from the library. Whether reading titles to tie into nature study topics, or just wanting well-written books full of…

Christmas Nature Books

There are so many great Christmas books to read with your children! I’ve posted about some of my top favorites from years past.  But, since I write nature studies, I thought I’d highlight some of my favorite Christmas picture books that relate well with nature study. Really good ones are few and far between, with…

Mountain Press Review

Mountain Press kindly sent us two books to review that we’d like you to know about! The Charcoal Forest by Beth A. Peluso is an informational picture book about how forest fires actually help plants and animals in some instances. Each two-page spread teaches you about a particular animal or plant and how it benefits…

Henri Matisse Resources

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…

Charles Russell Resources

We’ve been so immersed in our 1900’s history studies, that Charles Russell took a bit of a back seat this month.  We did find the time to practice a little horse drawing, though.  Enjoy the resources below! Charles Russell About Charles Russell Paintings We’re Studying Round-up on the Musselshell Lesson Ideas How to Draw a…

Georges Seurat Resources

Seurat is such a fun artist to study!  His use of pointillism was the biggest topic during the month, which made for some fun art projects.  The painting above was an attempt at recreating an “Alfalfa” style painting (see below) with a mixture of strokes and styles.  After using many different tools to create pointillism,…

Paul Gauguin Resources

Gauguin was an interesting character!  I can’t claim that he’s my favorite artist, but we still enjoyed our time spent with him this month. Self-Portraits Below are the resources that have been in the sidebar.  We won’t be doing artist or composer study in December.  I’ll have resources in the sidebar again in January! Paul…

The Thinker and Other Rodin Fun

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…

Rousseau’s Jungle Paintings

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…

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