This week has certainly had it's ups and downs. I'm sorry to say our streak of broken items has just continued, and I'm currently typing my blog on the only computer we have left in the house. Calib's died this week, and Asa tried to Frankenstein together one working desktop to no avail. We got a great deal on the HP website, but shipping takes FOREVER, and it won't be here until the first week in June. Asa's tablet also decided to stop working, but it's still under warranty. However, while it gets mailed back (which is also taking FOREVER), he doesn't have anything to check email on. *sigh*. So, everyone's using this one laptop. Anyway, all of that after paying the taxes and car repairs, it's just been annoying, and stressful. It'll be fine, but holy broken stuff!
When I last left you, we had just started our 'Art History' theme 'week'. We only have a couple more movements left to cover, but I'm way behind on blogging about all of that.
After the Renaissance, Baroque, and Realism, we skipped ahead to Pointillism. (I'll show you why in a minute). Pointillism actually has nothing to do with subject matter, and instead is a specific way of applying paint to canvas. The most famous pointillism artist is Georges Seurat.
Instead of using the point of a brush to make a bunch of dots, the boys used Q-tips.
Peyton and Hayden printed a basic coloring page they found online, and flipped it upside down. That way they had an outline to follow. Calib decided to just wing it.
I think they turned out pretty great.
Ok, full disclousure, this is the fourth time today I've reopened this blog to finish writing it. Between Calib's basketball game, today's art week, Asa working, and other kid's being over, it just hasn't been for me to blog. So, let's speed this up a bit, shall we?
Our next movement was Impressionism. We actually put this off a couple of days because it's supposed to be mostly done outside, and it was super hot- then super rainy, and I knew if we just held off for two or three days, the weather would be so much nicer for having our lessons outside.
For our first Impressionist, we went with Claude Monet, the guy who brought us the Japanese footbridge. I wanted to make this gorgeous water garden in a huge bucket/planter outside, but after days of searching for lily pads (very Monet) to buy, I still wasn't having any luck. So, I went to amazon and ordered Lotus seeds. So we don't have our pretty patio water garden yet, but we are getting a nice Science lesson on how lotus grow! We read our instructions, and watched a video about them.
You have to very carefully slice open the seeds. They come very hard, like an acorn, and we split them with an exacto knife.
I took pictures over the next few days. You can see a couple of them have sprouted and grown quite a bit. It is sort of high maintenance though, as you have to change the water twice a day, everyday. The three that have really sprouted, are on to phase two- they got put in a bucket with soil today. I will keep you posted.
Our next artist was Renoir, the painter of happiness. He liked to use bright colors. I found this cool effect to show bright colors through some black spray paint, so we decided to give it a try. I was almost positive this was going to be one of those pintrest fails, but it did totally work out.
You'll need some serious heavy paper (ours was as thick as cardboard), and matte acrylic paint (apparently glossy won't work).
We painted our entire piece of cardboard like paper, though how you do it is up to you. Peyton and Hayden went with stripes, and Calib did more blobs of color.
Then you need a can of spray paint (the cheap stuff will do), and some dish soap (the directions said the cheap stuff here will NOT do- I used Seventh Generation Dishsoap, which is just what we use for washing the dishes).
We took some boxes outside (to contain the spray paint), and put in our drawings.
Then we drizzled the soap on top. The boys used my slotted spoon, you don't want to get too much on it, or the spray point won't have anything to stick to, but you want to do it enough to make your painting interesting (spoiler: the spray point won't stick to where you drizzle the soap).
Then, you spray paint!
We let it dry for about 15-20 minutes, until the spray paint was dry (at least where it wasn't on the soap).
Then you get the hose! This is why you need the thick paper, I suppose. Just rinse off your drawing (don't use too heavy of a stream) and then let it dry.
And ta da! You've got a super cool effect!
Last up, we learned about Degas. He actually painted inside most of the time (he was big on painting ballet dancers), but I had found a cool activity that fit right in with the outdoorsy-ness of Impressionism that I wanted to fit in. So, after we learned about Degas, we did an anti-Degas activity.
We took some paint, some posterboard, some rubber bands, and some sticks we had taken from the neighbors when they trimmed their bushes last week (they were pleased to let us take a few branches for our project, thanks Lonnie and Jan!).
Then the boys headed off to find some ends to our brushes. We used flowers, various grasses and leaves. I attached them with the rubber band to the end of our sticks, and ta da! Nature paintbrushes.
Then we just painted, noting the different textures each brush made. (That's a neighborhood -also homeschooled- friend of the boys who joined in on the painting).
My kids missed the artistic gene that my dad possessed. Don't ask them to draw or paint a portrait of any sorts. However, the abstract-type art is always a hit around here. Anyone can do it, and it's fun, and easy. I was actually surprised how different everyone's turned out.
If you're wondering where I keep this art work (since I have at least three of everything), most of it gets hung up when it's dry, but the top of Ellie's crate makes a great place for the paintings to dry.
We're on to Post-Impressionism, where artists took the light, shadows and coloring from Impressionism and added their own spin on it- with different perspectives.
Our first artist was Rodin, the pioneer of modern sculptures. He's the guy who made 'The Thinker' sculpture, so we decided to make sculptures of our own.
For this project you'll need some wood blocks (I got ours at Micheals for 99 cents a piece, but you could use chunks of scrap wood too), some wire (I used old wire hangers), panty hose, and liquid gesso (which I had no idea what it was- but it took just a second to find it on Amazon).
We drilled two holes in the wood and cut about our hangers.
Then all you do is stick the wire in the wood, and bend it however you feel inspired.
When you're done, cut off one leg of panty hose, (you could probably use old tights or even a stretchy old sock too, just something with a foot end, and an open end), stretch it over your wire and wood and tie it off at the bottom. (Yes, unless you figure something else out, you'll have that little tied nub at the bottom, but it's not all that bad).
Then we painted on the liquid gesso. You want to cover the whole thing, pretty liberally. It'll really soak it in. But, to give you an idea of how much we used- that bottle in the picture was a little more than half gone after our three sculptures, and we have used it for another project you'll see in the next blog. After it dried, we did a second coat.
The gesso is like a primer. It's not just paint, and it will harden a bit (don't expect rock solid, but it's not super flimsy either), but it gives your paint a 'tooth' to stick to.
Then, we painted. Hayden went bananas with mixed blues. He didn't layer at all, there was no 'first coat' for him, just tons of paint slathered on. But, it totally works. There's no right or wrong way to do it.
Peyton painted his with a scene, you can see here his grass and sky. Calib, however, painted the whole thing orange and let it dry.
Then later, once it was dry, he took it outside and splatter painted it!
I think they all are pretty unique. And you'd never guess what it's made out of, which is kind of cool.
We had an extra artist (in which the boys did an 'artist study), with no real activity because we threw Rodin in there, and he wasn't in our art book. Sorry Henri, Rousseau, nobody appreciated your art when you were alive, and then you didn't even get an activity.
So, on to Paul Gaugin, who traveled the world and painted what he saw. In honor of him, we played Around the World, basketball style (again, we had some company).
And we had to give a nod to Van Gogh. I could have gone with about a bazillion different activities here. They are ALL over Pinterest. But, Van Gogh was inspired by Japanese wood blocks, and I really wanted an excuse to use a woodburning kit I had found on amazon. It was a strech, but I was excited. The kit came with everything we needed, including wood pieces, designs to trace and carbon paper!
So the boys had a fun lesson on how carbon paper works. Everyone attached their chosen design, we put the carbon paper (shiny side down) in between and the boys traced the design with a ball point pen.
Then we got to use the woodburning pen!
They aren't perfect, but Peyton in-particular really loved using the wood-burning pen. Hayden refused to use it, saying he was going to burn himself, so after he traced it, I did his for him.
Then we were on to Symbolism, where we had a talk about similes vs. metaphors (and idoms, and all those other fun Language Arts terms)
We had two artists for Symbolism: Edvard Munch (for any artsy person out there, I know some of these artists fit into more than one movement- and we talked about that too).
Munch is most famous for a series of 22 paintings called the Frieze of Life, including 'The Scream'. His art was pretty frightening, and some places even took him off display. For our Munch activity, we took air dry clay (and some playdoh which has cracked a little more than we'd like) and made monster magnets.
They're almost dry, so I'll attach the magnets then, but for now you can see the almost finished products.
Our other artist, Gustav Klimt (the guy who painted 'The Kiss') was inspired by mosaics of the Byzantine era. We had gotten a mosaic to do for lessons by dad, but then we opted for another activity instead, so I had this sitting around just wanting for something we could apply it to.
The mosaic kit came with everything we needed. We mixed the cement and filled the mold. We used the stick to level it off....
...and then we filled it with the gems and broken tiles.
We waited about 24 hours to pull it out of the mold, and it slide right out. We put it in the front flower bed right outside our door.
Up next, Cubism, where artists look at subjects in a new way in an effort to depict three dimensions on canvas. We actually did Symbolism and Cubism the same day, and our Cubism artist was a guy the boys already knew, Pablo Picasso!
We could have done the faces he's so famous for, but that many projects in one day seems like a lot, so instead we made these red, white, and blue drinks in honor of his rose and blue periods. We also had a nice little science lesson in why the drinks stay separated. Really if you make these things, you can do any variation of drinks, as long as the sugar content is pretty different- with the highest sugar content on the bottom. Oh, and it helps if you pour it over all kinds of ice.
Yesterday we did Expressionism (don't mind the Surrealism, we did that today). In Expressionism, subjects are often distorted and exaggerated. Our featured artist of the day was Franz Marc, who liked animals more than people (I feel ya, Franz!) , and it showed in his paintings.
So we painted some exaggerated, expressionist lions. Like I said, we're not artists in this house. But I found a tutorial on how to do these step by step, layer by layer (there was a lot of drying time mixed in here!), and they were pretty easy.
Once our tigers were in place, we painted their manes, by just using our fingers!
However, Peyton hates putting his fingers in paint, so I told him he could use a brush. No sense making him hate the project just because of finger painting, and he did a really good job blending his colors without using his finger tips.
After the manes were done, we let them dry once again...
...before tracing over our black lines and adding the whiskers. I actually love these, I think they are adorable!
Since I was showing a tutorial of how to do them, I got to do one too!
My board is super full (actually this picture was a few movements ago), but every day we've been having 'pop quiz' lunch, where we eat our lunch and I ask questions (it works since I'm the one that sits staring at the board). The boys are actually killing it too. Hayden has totally surprised me how much he's memorized. He can tell you each artist, what movement they belong to, and their painting without any problem. At first I thought this was going to be Greek Mythology, where Hayden could rattle off every single thing we taught him, while Peyton lagged a bit behind, and Calib could just never get a handle on it. But, Peyton and Calib have really come around. Repetition of everyday quizzes for the win! Also, I'm going to skip sharing today's movement. We had two artists, and two projects, but they are both two-day type things, and I don't want to show you the first half and not the second, but they are SUPER cool. I'm pretty excited about these next couple days, I've got some cool stuff planned.
In other home school news, we held our Chocolate and Chewy Party debates for the Candy Bar Election. We're working on some informative videos on Primaries, but we're also wanting to use those videos to teach the boys how to edit them-- BUT you need an actual computer for that, and as you know, that's not something we have right now. So hang in there if you're a Candy Bar voter, we're still here!
In other neighborhood news, thanks to the warmer weather my house is still the house to be at. We've got Pokemon trades (See Calib and his Tepigs), and basketball games seemingly non-stop. But, when you're work from home computer is right inside the door, and your dog (Porkchop) barks everytime someone knocks. you have to let people know not to knock!
Last weekend we celebrated the Kentucky Derby with some Kentucky Hot Browns for lunch, and I let each of the boys bet up to 5 points on a horse. We said we'd pay out in points according to the odds, which just meant Peyton bid on the long shot. Fortunately, he didn't win.
It was also Mother's Day, but we don't usually do anything outside the house for it. (You know how much I hate crowds!) Plus, Asa's Sunday shift differential is lost if he takes a vacation day, so while he worked from home, we all played all the games that I wanted to play.
They even have to play the games that had been retired because I won them too much. Of course Asa made me lunch and dinner (Shrimp Po Boys, and his famous chicken tenders with mashed potatoes!), but he does that almost everyday anyway. I did make Nancy Reagan Mac and Cheese once this week, but that's about all I cook these days.
My mom also sent me a card and $20, so we used it to go to Sonic's summer of shakes. They are half price after 8 pm!
We had some REALLY nice weather days. Highs were in the high 70s/low 80s AND more importantly we had low humidity that's pretty much unheard of this time of year. We had dinner outside one night, and the screen door has been open a lot- which the cats love.
In the past few days, it's warmed up a bit- and we've made a few trips to the pool. We're trying to enjoy our last few weeks with kids in school during the day, and having the pool all to ourselves.
Last Monday, Asa and I finally got away for a date day, which was just lovely. We stopped by Disney Springs (formerly Downtown Disney) first. We decided to hit the Hangar Bar, a newish place that honor's Indiana Jones.
It was a little warm, but lovely in the shade, so we opted to sit on the 'patio' outside, which is actually a boat!
The menu is fun- each page is a new continent, and there's all kinds of treat's for those Indiana Jones fans.
It was nearly noon, and Asa has no shame in having morning drinks- so he got the Fountain of Youth
Every continent has a fun non-alcoholic drink too, so I went with that. Teddy's Tea from Africa (yay!) is green tea with peach and tangerine and mint, and it is the most amazing drink I've ever had. I will get this everytime I go to Disney Springs from now on.
We wanted to do a little bit of a Disney Springs food crawl for lunch (really hoping the new poutine and crepe place would be in soft openings- but that didn't work out-- they officially open tomorrow), so after looking over the menu of a few appetizers we decided on the falafal tacos. They were a little spicy for my taste, but otherwise full of flavor and a good balance of textures.
We walked over hoping we could get into the new area, the last one to open- but it's still blocked off. The walls are down now though, and instead there is just planters on wheels blocking the bridges. Like I said, a ton of those places over there open tomorrow, so we'll go again soon, and hopefully have some awesome new foods. You guys, Poutine!!!
We decided those mini falafal tacos wouldn't do for lunch, so we decided to head to Cookes of Dublin to split Fish and Chips. Cookes is the counter service part of Raglan Road (one of those bucket list Tables in Wonderland places we haven't been to yet), and people rave about the fish and chips at both places. They are as good as advertised, but Asa and I were split on if they were better than the one's in England at Epcot.
After some walking around, we headed over to Fort Wilderness and rented a canoe. We were so excited because the river was high enough we could paddle around the whole circle! With our passholder discount, it was a whopping $7 for the canoe rental, and you can't beat that! It was really quiet too, we were the only canoe out- and we saw lots of birds and turtles.
But, it is getting hotter- as evident by how sweaty Asa got on our trip around the campgrounds.
So we headed off to the pool. You can't crash a whole lot of Disney pools anymore, but this one still works!
Plus, you can shower and change in their bathrooms- it's fully prepared for that since it is a campgrounds, and nobody thinks you're out of place. After awhile at the pool we headed out to the Polynesian for our dinner reservations at O'Hana!
O'hana is one of my favorite Disney restaurants. It's still in 'value' season for pricing, and Tables in Wonderland isn't blacked out, plus we were celebrating mother's day a day late, and a hard-to-get- reservation just happened to pop up because someone cancelled, so we figured we'd book it.
I actually LOVE the bread and the salad more than anything. The dressing on the salad is a honey lime, and the bread is pineapple!
They also bring your appetizers of chicken wings and dumplings, and sides of vegetables and noodles (the noodles are also a fav, even though everything is good!)
Then your waiter brings around skewers of steak, chicken, and shrimp. It's always good, but it seemed like it was cooked better this time than ever before!
Don't even get me started on the bread pudding for dessert. It is, for me, hands down, the best dessert on Disney property.
After dinner, we headed over to the Magic Kingdom.
Fun fact: even if you don't use your Magic Band to get into park, it still works for Fastpasses. I'm sorry if you're anal about following rules, and think this is totally unfair, but I double booked Fastpasses- three for me and Asa, three for Peyton and Calib, and just had the times pretty much overlap.
Our first fastpass was for Space Ranger Spin, and it was the first time I got a maxed out score. Asa has done it a handful of times, but I've never even come close.
I was a Galactic Hero, and I have the card to prove it!
So between our fastpasses, we did no-wait rides, like the people mover, and Philharmagic.
But, in two hours we managed to use 7 or 8 fastpasses, and go on like 4 other rides. We waited for nothing, and it was amazing. Someday, Disney will probably close that loophole, but I don't even care- until they do, this is our new way of doing Disney Date days.
We decided to take the boat back to the Polynesian for a more scenic view, it was such a nice night. I'm just waiting for those sticky, steamy florida nights. I know they're coming for me, but until then- I'm soaking it in!
Since we were parked at the Polynesian, I thought it'd be fun to stop by Trader Sam's for one more drink.
I loved that Asa's 'dark and stormy' umbrella was turned like it was all wind blown!
I also totally thought these pictures were in my last blog, but I guess not. This was nearly two weeks ago, but we did fit in another trip to Top Golf. Now that we all have our passes, it's only $20 for the hour for the bay. That beats bowling prices!
Of course, add another $10 if you get the injectable donut holes.
Oh, and we finally got the light on 54! It's exciting for this mom, who has a kid who can legally drive. That was a dangerous intersection for sure. Problem solved!
That's it. I feel like all I did in the last two hours is write my blog, but now I'm all caught up. I will leave you with some cute Ellie pictures.
Her and Dipper are becoming buddies. I just looked over one day, and Dipper was cleaning her ears!
And nobody likes covers more than my Els-a-Bels.
But my favorite had to be the way we found her this morning sleeping with Calib.
That is it from here. I promise it won't be two weeks until I blog again. Because holy geez, have I learned my lesson- that was a LONG one to write.
Next Up: More Art Week, and either a Florida weekend, or taking advantage of the last 4 on the crowd calendar, we'll see how it goes.
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