Hanna's Cold Winter

To finish up with our week of Hanna's Cold Winter we had an art day.  The boys drew their Hippos using the Draw Right Now book and then used watercolors to paint it.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Nathan's Drawing Dreams Donation

Last week I was contacted on Flickr with a request to use Nathan's art for the Drawing Dreams Foundation. Today they wrote to tell me that Nathan's art will be featured on the home page for a couple weeks! Above is a screen shot. :o)

Artist Study - Rousseau

Nathan - age 10

Seth - age 8

project idea inspired by Art for Kids.

A fun, online Jungle Interactive game, inspired by Rousseau.

Since we do not have access to an English library I was thrilled to find some examples of Rousseau's Jungle art in books that I already owned. These are the books I pulled from my shelf and was able to use:

Climbing Kansas Mountains - Art Lesson

Seth explored using chalk on textured paper. I didn't have any darker paper, so we just used watercolor paper.


The boys also had fun exploring oil pastels as they copied the sunflower from the back of our book, Climbing Kansas Mountains.

Seth's Sunflower:
Nathan's Sunflower:

and mom's:

Draw Write Now

This year I want to incorporate more copywork into our school. For beginners, I really like Draw Write Now and thanks to PaperbackSwap, I finally have a complete set. Homeschool Share has a list that connects the Draw Write Now books with our Five in a Row book of the week.

I have begun using it in a few different ways.

Sometimes (especially for Seth) we use it exactly how it is written up. He draws the picture and copies what was written.

Recently I noticed that Seth really needed help with his letter formation. I made up a page for him (using the handwriting tips from donnayoung.org):

Sometimes, they will copy a short passage out of our Five in a Row book for the week:

Again, I gave Seth a little extra help. He tends to copy letters exactly as they appear and I don't really want him writing his a's like 'a'. So I typed his out for him:

And finally, for Christopher, I have been letting him write his own little stories. They are short (they fit on the one page) and I don't always go back and correct his spelling. The picture is his inspiration and I just want him to enjoy the creative writing process without a lot of red tape:


They all three enjoy drawing. And while Christopher has gone past stick people, Nathan and Seth have not. This may just look like a simple elementary handwriting program, but it helps them pay attention to detail and see the steps of a drawing. I think it will be useful to us for a few years, yet.