Easy Fine Art:Van Gogh

After last week's art-scapades, I decided to continue our art education. The middle and highschooler both take a weekly art class but the first grader isn't this year.

On the right of the pic is my middle schooler's interpretation and recreation of Starry Night. On the upper left is the first grader's original relief painting in the works.

It was very simple. First, I searched Pinterest for inspiration. Then I found a few very short videos on the work of Van Gogh on youtube.

The first grader watched the video then I allowed him to recreate one of Van Gogh's works and create his own using an easy relief method.




Draw on art paper any design with a white crayon. Using water color paints, paint over your hidden design. The crayon will produce blank spaces under the water color as a relief painting.

This was his final piece, an interpretation of Van Gogh's Starry Night. I also printed out a free (found online) Van Gogh coloring page and he wrote a couple sentences of facts he learned about the artist underneath.

Above is the version I did with a student at work. I made all the water color marker lines and also crayon lines in white (that you can't see) and in black for the building. She used a wet paint brush to blend the colors together. We work on a lot of fine motor skills together during her sessions. This also entails learning and moving the paint brush from left to right and up and down.

Math Brain : STEM

Creating animal dens.

It's been a rough few months due to the move and adjusting to all of that, so I have been off my home-educating game a bit. Haha. I love pinterest for inspiring ideas! I found various activities using marshmallows and tooth picks. I knew there were STEM challenges to do but I wanted more creative exercises. Sometimes all you need is one suggestion to spark your own ideas.

The middle schooler's structure.

The middle schooler could not help joining in when she saw the first grader starting his structure. 

Building a structure with tooth picks and marshmallows.

The initial challenge was to create animal dens from the supplies given. Once that was completed, I upped the ante by challenging my students to create the tallest, free standing structure possible. It needed to be sound enough to maintain it's height with out falling over. 

It's more challenging then it sounds. They enjoyed this and it covered all STEM areas: science, technology, engineering and math. Supposedly, right? haha. They definitely experienced and learned about the force of gravity. 

Can you guess which structure was created by the middle schooler and which was created by the high schooler & first grader team?

Easy Fine Art: Matisse

Matisse inspired Valentine art.

I subscribed to a few inspiring and informative home-educating blogs. The various blogs are a great resource to free printables, activities and ideas for all sortts of subjects. Recently one suggested a Valentined theme fine art unit. Easy peasy!

The art piece was using the style of Matisse's cut out art. Using water coor markers, the first grader drew geometric shapes (squares) and colored them in, later going over them with a brush and water to create a little water color effect. He cut out heart shapes from construction paper and glued those on top. Voila!

I found printable versions of Henry Matisse's art work for him to color. Youtube has become my new BFF as well. I am amazed at how many great educational videos can be found. I chose a few different but short videos about Matisse and his work. The first grader watched those and then wrote a few biographical sentences about what he learned.

We paste all these pieces into a spiral bound notebook (my attempt at organization) to keep them all in one place. This is working well when we have a Learning Record meeting, as I can show our Educational Specialist our portfolio (book) and tear out a page to give her as a sample.

Fall Fun and Science

We took a quick walk around the block the other day, collecting leaves specifically to do a few leaf rubbings.

I forget how simply gorgeous leaf rubbings really are.

It's SoCal so...not too many varieties or fall-ish colors in my hood but we used what we could find and it was good enough. 

We attempted to do the rubbings using oil pastels, like I read on another blog but it did not work well. Back to good ol' crayola it was and that was great. The crayon rubbing really highlighted the veins of the leaves. 

After the rubbings, we took a closer look with our microscope. It's so fun to get such a magnified view. It's a school microscope but it's better then our natural eye. It still looks amazing and completely fascinating. 

To add to our Fall nature study, we did a classic craft: pine cone bird feeder.

I used the birdseed that I had left over from our summer sensory bin. We had actually tossed all the bird seed into the garden...but it was still in a nice pile.

We took a pine cone outside and poured (all natural!) peanut butter all over it. Then we rolled the pine cone in the bird seed pile, which was quite convenient actually!

I thought the perfect place to hang our bird feeder would be right outside our kitchen window. It's hard to reach from outside, so I hoisted Kurtis onto my shoulders and stretched on my tip toes until he could reach and hang it on the hook. Haha!

We also read this awesome book, Autumn Leaves. The pictures are great.

I love Autumn!