Homeschool Art: Collage Self Portraits

I love art! My background is fiber arts: wool, silk, dyeing, needle felt soft sculpture, knitting, crochet, felting, cross stitch. All at a hobby level. I've sold some pieces on etsy but it's something I pursue because I love to create. I love to play with color and I love the feeling of getting thing in my head out into a tangible way.

My goal for homeschooling Art has been to give the girls some background of Art History. To view Art as something not always serious but to enjoy and respect the creative spirit that underlies all works of art.

Our most resent lesson has been on Portraits, Self portraits and Collage.

We've viewed historical self portraits online. To carry it further I found a lesson plan already online geared towards high schoolers by the artist Megan Coyle. I modified it for my elementary aged children to fit with our study of  Self Portraits.  We didn't use Ms. Coyle's painting with paper technique but we did view many of her portraits and other works made with collage. We read her biography and then watched the following youtube videos.

This is a 10 minute talk that Megan Coyle gave.

We then read read pages 12 and 13 from 'The Usborne Introduction to Art'. It talks about self portraits.


I then set the girls loose on making their own self portraits out of collage.

New Adventure: Chickens!

In attempt to add more to our growing to do list we've decided to jump into urban chicken keeping. Our city allows hens but not roosters. We live a few minutes from the center of our city. It isn't a large city but it neighbors two other cities and they make up the largest 'urban' area for a good hour radius.

 

 

The husband and I have read about chickens on and off for a good 2 years. It's something we had talked about doing but we hadn't set a target date. Then we saw a listing for a 'Chicken Tractor' on Craigslist. We contacted the builder and found that it had already been sold but that he would happily build us one.

 

 

Now the husband is all things smart, and mechanical but carpentry isn't really his skill. So for things like this we have found that it is a better choice for us as a family to purchase made items then build them. There are however loads of DIY sites to build your own.

 

A 'Chicken Tractor' is a movable chicken coop with a chicken run attached that allows it to be moved every few days. We have a pretty good size back yard and prefer that it doesn't become one big dirt yard. Which could easily happen if we allowed the chickens to have the total run of the place. We are also planning on making a movable chicken run to give them additional space.

 

 

The girls are eggcited (pun intended) we plan to keep 4 hens and are starting off with chicks. We plan to use components of lapbooking and notebooking to document what they learn along the way. Keep a 3 month record of how many eggs we get once the chicks become hens and start laying which should be around August/ September.

 

 

Thankfully we have several local friends that keep chickens. Another homeschooling family whom we do a science co-op with has been most helpful. Their children have shown our children how to feed the hens, how to pick them up and also some insights into chick keeping and raising.

 

 

We plan to acquire some chicks this coming week. 

 

 

 

 

Art History: Mary Cassatt

**I originally posted this on my separate Homeschooling blog. I've decided to just merge my attempt at a separate home school blog to this blog, since in the past I've shared about our homeschooling adventure**

 

Something I've added this year to our home school studies is Art History. In the past the girls have done tons of arts and crafts and both have taken art classes/workshops as part of a co-op but I wanted them to also know some of the history behind the paintings. Add to the fact that they both love biographies and 'Intro to Art History and Great Artists' was born. It's also an added bonus that both girls can work on something together. Having a 1st grader and a 5th grader can make collaborative classes hard to do.

For Mary Cassatt we read the book 'Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists: Mary Cassatt' by Mike Venezia

We read page 84 or 'Start Exploring Masterpieces' by Mary Martin and Steven Zorn. The girls also painted the corresponding painting by Mary Cassatt ' Girl Arranging Her Hair'

 

I read pages 88-89 of The Usborne Introduction to Art. Which explains about impressionism and we talked about other Impressionistic painters.

We watched this video from 'Getting to know the World's Greatest Artists. Free on Youtube

 

 

And we also watched this 'Crash Course in Impressionism' Free on Youtube.

 

And lastly we used Google Image to view other art work by Mary Cassatt.

Pre-planning for the win!

So this early riser thing might be better if I went to bed at a normal bedtime instead of 2 a.m. I'm not sure exactly how 10 p.m. became 2 a.m. but it did involve yarn and a movie.

For accountability in the Early to Rise Challenge I got up at 7:35 a.m. Not the 6:30 a.m. I was shooting for. But I left my phone in the car, didn't set an alarm. Yada Yada, excuse, excuse. It all boils down to poor planning and follow through on my part last night. But I'm a big girl and I give myself grace. So the fact that I'm running on 5 hours of sleep and 2/3 a pot of coffee isn't something to complain to much about, I did it to myself. Upside is I finished a hat I'm knitting for my small group at church (we are making hats for the local homeless shelter) and I got to have some alone time.

I did in my half stumble to bed last night remember to soak some beans. This allowed me to stock the freezer with pre-cooked beans and lentils.

Freezer 12 cups of cooked black beans and kidney beans, additional 2 cups cooked for dinner. 6 cups of cooked lentils for the freezer and 2 cups for dinner. We are having chili over baked potato.

Tuesday nights we have girl scouts and then soccer, all resulting in us not sitting down to eat until 6:45 pm but it's really important to us to sit down as a family and eat a meal.

My goal is still a 6:30 a.m. wake up. Lets see if I can make it Wednesday.

But I don't WANNA!!!

I'm not a morning person. I'm not mean or surly. It's just if left to my own I would have a sleep/wake cycle that went something like this: up at 9am, lay in bed til 10a, stay up until 2am and repeat. I'm a night owl. I come from a long line of night owls. BUT I do so much better getting up earlier.

The added benefit is that my older daughter is a morning person and my younger daughter isn't. The younger one does wake up and bounce out of bed ready to go. I'd like to cultivate this earlier morning time as some time just for myself and some time with my older daughter. Who at 10 1/2 is more than willing to let mom have a cuppa coffee before she starts chatting.

I'm participating in Money Saving Mom's Early Riser challenge.  I'm hoping it helpful. I found her 31 days to a more organized challenge last year helpful when we moved into our rental house. I'm actually toying with the idea of doing that too since moving into our new house 3 weeks ago.

What new house?! Yeah I really do need to do a blog catch-up from the few months I wasn't blogging. I'll get to it this week.

But since moving and the weeks leading up to moving I got out of our routine and my wake up times slowly crept up to 8 a.m. Last week I was able to shake it back down to 7:30a. VICTORY!

So onto Monday. The challenge for today is to document your wake up time and to create a plan for your mornings. The start of the challenge is to determine a goal wake up time. Mine is 6:30 a.m. The Husband usually is up and gone by then but if I get up much earlier then I'd be cutting into his morning. He's a morning person but also that's is personal quite time. We just have never been the couple that sits and has a morning coffee together on a weekday and that's ok.

I woke up at 6:30 today! Then laid in bed until 7:30 a.m. with the covers over my head willing myself to get up. I'm calling this mixed success. I never fell back to sleep!

Moving onto a plan for the mornings. I'd like my mornings to go like this.
Up at 6:30 a.m.

workout and do devotional until 7:30a.m. Shower, coffee, chit chat with the 10 1/2 yr old.

8:15 a.m. wake up the sleeping 7yr old and get her going.

Start on my morning cleaning routine:
Dishes
Start a load of laundry
Clean the bathroom upstairs
Make bed (check to make sure kids made theirs)
Do a 15 minute clean up of the house.

9:05 a.m. have a coffee break, blog and go over my to do list for the day.

9:30 a.m. start homeschooling (between 9-9:30am has been our normal start time all year.

For today I've got the waking up, to-do list, devotional and chit chat with the 10 1/2 yr old done. I'll be waking up the 7yr old soon and be making a mad dash to get a shower in before we start homeschooling. I'll be getting the cleaning done while they take their morning break from homeschooling...

I really should have gotten out of bed at 6:30 a.m. but man my bed was so snuggly warm.

Dinner last night: Bacon Spinach Egg Bake

Tuesdays are shaping up to be our busiest day of the week. Spring Soccer has started up and my youngest child is playing. Both girls played Fall Soccer. Our Tuesdays run like this. Full day of homeschooling, both girls have a workshop/co-op class in the afternoon then we have an hour of time before girl scouts then we have 30mins before soccer for the youngest. She gets home from that at 6:30p and we sit down to a later dinner. My goal is for Tuesdays to be something I can make up early in the day and either Greg or I can dish it up.

 

Bacon Spinach Egg Bake

 

 

Ingredients

 

3 slices of bread cut into cubes (I just used wheat bread, I've used french bread, stale bread etc in the past)

 

1/2 pound of bacon cooked and crumbled

 

8 eggs

 

1/2 cup cheese ( I used shredded cheddar)

 

1/4 cup milk (I used 2%)

 

1 cup frozen spinach

 

Salt and Pepper

 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. I used an oval vintage pyrex dish that I have but you could use and 8x8 inch pyrex dish. Spray it with some PAM or rub some butter on that sucker.

 

Place your cubed bread in the bottom of your cooking dish. Next add the bacon and spinach. In another dish mix up the eggs and milk, break up the yoke like you would for scrambled egg. Add that to your dish. Salt and pepper and sprinkle cheese on top. Cover and cook for 45-55mins.

 

Easy, Peasy and yummy. If I'd thought ahead I would have served this with a salad but we just had this in a bowl and called it good. Greg cooked up the bacon on Sunday when we had bacon venison burgers. Mmmm that was tasty.

 



Almond Banana Slow Cooker Oatmeal

Dusting off some cobwebs on this blog. It's been forever and a day but Spring is springing and I'm in the mood to be bloggin'

Last night I made Slow Cooker Oatmeal. I've made it in the past but I played around with some new ingredients. The kids loved it this morning and so did I. I'm not sure if the husband tried any on his way into work.

Ingredients:

2 cups old fashion or steal cut oatmeal

5 cups of water

1/2 cups of Almond Butter. ( I used yummy fresh ground almond butter from my local health food store.)

2 Bananas sliced

1/2 cup honey (or use whatever sugar/sweetener you like but you may have to play with the measurement)

1 1/2 tablespoons cinnamon

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

set your slow cooker to low for 8-10 hours.

A few words of advice, you may want to use a slow cooker liner or if you use PAM you may want to spray your slow cooker for ease of clean-up.

My daughters and I ate it with a little dash of maple syrup and two of us also threw on some dried cherries.