Courageous Joy

Meet the Masters -

We finally got this worked into our schedule. I think we are going to really LIKE this program. It combines art history, appreciation AND technique in one easy to use program. I had heard it was expensive...but honestly $79 for a year is NOT bad at all when you consider that art classes were costing us $30 a month PER CHILD. To come clean, it was a REALLY good deal for me because the state of AK paid for it. ::snort::

The program consists of three steps: a biographical overview of the master artist's life, a study of his/her technique and then a project where the kids practice the technique - all at their level. Each lesson has a 20 minute (or so) computer slide show...cool.

In the future I think we'll do the slide show/biographical study earlier in the week and save the technique and project for Fridays. I'll also probably be jumping back and forth between the 5-7 and 8-9 projects.

Today we previewed the artists we will be studying (Van Gogh, Homer, Monet, Picasso, Cassatt, Mondrian) and made a portfolio. I thought they turned out rather nice and I was pleased with the children's creativity - in other words I liked theirs better than the samples. ::snort::

I think we could make a lap book of artists and art vocabulary....but maybe that would be to much hands on. We seem to be doing a lot of cutting, pasting and such this year. Of course, it's on Nolan's IEP (my personal IEP for the children)...."improve Nolan's fine motor skills, with the goal of holding a pencil". We are accomplishing that goal with things like "peeling potatoes, sweeping the floor (dustpan is hard), coloring, clay, cutting and pasting....".

Here are some photos (strange that 1/2 the photos from the camera didn't load to the computer):

Making our artist portfolios

Zander wanted to do this with us - he decided his job was punching stars (??) which I incorporated into his and my portfolios and sharpening colored pencils. Nolan worked hard on his....he had to do the border twice and chose to write out all the names though I offered him the option of gluing names on like Zander did. He made a fringe border on his - doesn't show up real well.

Arielle's on the left and mine on the right (yep - decided to do my own even before reading comments ::snort::)

Now on to create "deeper than ever beet root pie" ::snort::