Artist of the Month: Wassily Kandinsky

I needed COLOR in my entrance way so the first week of school, we spent two morning group sessions doing art.  Morning one:  I introduced the artist and we began painted papers for our collage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky

Wikipedia has been a lovely resource for us schooling at home.  I set up at least 2 laptops at the table and we can skim right through an article together as a group.   Makes less prep time for me for sure!  We pulled in not only art but also math (how old he was, how long he was in France, etc) and geography (where is Moscow, Russia and France).  It's so fun to introduce an artist (or review one) and with the mixed age groups...the conversations are amazing!

Anyway...the one piece of artwork that wasn't on Wikipedia that I wanted them to focus on was this one...

We did painted paper collage instead of just painting here.  Was able to talk about primary and secondary colors (complementary, etc. I reviewed on a more 1:1 basis with the older ones.).  We also chatted about texture and so on.

We live in a very "cozy" house...so schooling at home with multiple children is quite a treat sometimes...especially with whole group art lessons.  But doing art as a group has so many pros that I just deal with the cons.  Let's just say that my husband tells me..."You know...there are some things I just don't need to know."  Ha!  Like this... 

Well, you can see about 21 sheets here and we covered this floor and the entrance way bench and the washer and dryer...let's just say that this room was "out of order for the day".  My 3rd grader actually figured it out for us...right up his alley. "If we each paint 2 sheets of paper and we are doing primary and secondary colors...that's 6.  5x2=10 x 6= 60...mom, we're going to have 60 sheets of paper laying around drying."  Yep.  That we did. (I had them do more so that we had some for our scrap box.) I found out that the steam mop does pretty good getting the paint off the floor.  And the kids realized that mom can get the same table ready for school work ready in about 3 minutes flat.  Ha!

All I can say was..."What a mess! But so much fun they had."  It was definitely organized chaos.  I set our whole spinner full of paintbrushes of every shape, size and texture and had a couple trays for the dirty ones.  Then they went to town!  So different than preschool.  These kiddos were pretty capable of getting it all done with me doing the running and switching of papers.  :-)

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 Day 2 wasn't quite as messy but there was a bit more prep time for me the night before.  This project could definitely have taken more than 2 days but I did prep the paper for them (of course they wanted their own papers!).  I cut them into squares for them and printed off cardstock template circles.  I even helped trace and cut a few circles to keep things moving quickly and smoothly. Tsk..tsk!

Table isn't big enough for all of them and 12x18 pieces of construction paper so...a couple chose to work on the floor...which must be cleaned on a regular basis because when dealing with a small house...the floor is our second table.  Ha!  (We had decided on the choice of black, brown or white paper because those were the ones we didn't paint.)

 End outcomes!  

Aren't they awesome?!  They now grace the entrance way wall.  Looking forward to October's project...not quite sure which artist we'll learn about...but pondering it!  I like to reinforce something they are learning in K12.

Weaving

One of our whole group art lessons came from Art2. Weaving!

Many 2nd grade lessons have turned into whole group lessons because they are easily adaptable for the younger kiddos and the older kiddos just plain enjoy them.  Also, since neither the 3rd and 4th grader has used the K12 curriculum before, this is kind of a way to fill in the gap a little more.  The 2nd graders and I can easily summarize the lesson as we work.  :-)

 

With a little bit of help (not any more than I gave the 1st and 2nd graders), my preschooler was able to do this project too!

 

 An "extra" that the K12 lesson added to this "oldie but goodie" project is to wrap yarn over a tp or paper towel tube and print over top of the weaving to make it look more like cloth.  :-)

Some did...

 Some chose not to...which was a-okay!

 

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Great for color review---meaning at the school-age level, cool/warm/complimentary, etc.  I love their color combos!  It did take us a bit longer to do because I changed to whole group at the last minute and hadn't asked them all what colors they were going to use.  Then one of my paper cutters decided to not work well and so it was only me cutting strips vs. having my 4th grader and I cutting strips.  But it all worked out!  They turned out nice.  Wish we had a way to have lamintated them.  They would have made great placemats!

 

 

 

Warm and Cool Colors

One challenge with Schooling at Home with 3 of the kiddos not being yours and thus being on a time schedule, is how do we fit in all the subjects that require 1:1 instruction for most of the lesson?  Well, we're figuring it out...slowly but surely.  :-)

 

One way we have success is that we have a group lesson each morning and one afternoon a week.  Typically it's art, history, or social studies.  The really nice thing is that the kiddos get to touch on a lot that they might not get a chance to if they were just doing what was assigned to them!

 

Art is a favorite, of course.  It's one of several aspects that I like about this program vs. our local public school.  The children start "art" in elementary instead of middle school and high school.  Another aspect is that after the basics of art have been taught/reviewed, they begin to correlate their art project with what they are learning in History!  I've seen a BIG difference with my own 2nd grade kiddo who did NOT like 'art' (mainly because language arts had the word 'art' in it! tee hee).  Between our art lessons and our Draw.Write.Now, he's really starting to take a liking to drawing and art in general.  So neat to see!  The mother of the 1st grader has also mentioned that her child's attitude toward creating art has changed also.  :-) 

 This was actually an afternoon group lesson...art-around the kitchen table...but on a side note, we did try our less mess group lessons in the living room in a more relaxed state but it wasn't working out for us so almost all our group sessions take place around the table. :-) 

Here we were "introducing" the color wheel.  Why I say "introducing" is because it was an introduction lesson for 3 grade art but anyone that has been with me during preschool years (which all of these kiddos have) has already been "introduced" to the color wheel. 

 

I first gave them a cardstock copy of the color wheel.  I can not share the color wheel document since it's copyrighted, I'm sure, but there are many options on the Internet...here's one.

 

http://www.mrprintables.com/printable-color-wheel.html

 

We actually talked about the primary colors and secondary colors first and traced around the triangles first with crayon and wrote them down on a simple chart...you can download the chart here.  It was very handy to have a cup full of crayons with the colors they needed right at their space and to also have a crayon sharpener handy.  :-P  Then we moved onto intermediate and complementary colors.  As you can see, cool and warm colors had not been completed.  We actually broke this activity up into 2 sessions.  The chart will be cut and glued to the back of their color wheel.  The children then used red, blue, and yellow to paint their color wheel.  Actually, that was the initial decision but time was flying and the younger ones were having a difficult time mixing the colors to get 'true' colors (or at least relatively 'true' colors) so we did bring out some additional secondary paints to mix for intermediate colors.  A., the 4th grader was the only one that didn't "cheat" a little bit! 

The second session we focused on cool and warm colors.  We noticed that we can pretty much split the color wheel in half and see the warm colors on one side and the cool colors on the other side.  Children chose a shape and created a collage with either cool or warm colors.

Left to right and top to bottom...

9 yrs, 8 yrs, 7 yrs, 7 yrs, 6 yrs, 3 yrs 

 

Simple and fun!