Satori Smiles

Today our family traveled back to prehistoric times where we lived as nomads. We had been struggling to find the usual herds of animals that we followed every year, so we returned to a certain cave to pray for plentiful animals to hunt. This cave was long and dark, but we had the use of fire to see the cave walls, upon which we did our paintings of animals.

Times have been hard for our family lately and the animals that gave us sustenance have been scarce. This cave ceremony we believed would bring more animals back to our area. We each drew animals, using colors like red ochre, hematite and charcoal. We outlined them in black and filled them in with reds, browns, and whites.

Mama was the shaman, and beat the drum while chanting our ritual songs. She also drew a herd of grazing animals.

Daddy remembered our Great Mammoth hunts, where we would hunt the plentiful woolly mammoths. But lately, we haven’t seen any mammoths, which give us food, shelter and clothing. He’s drawing his mammoth in hopes that we can find more of these creatures.

Baby (the youngest in the clan) drew lots of animals, but especially the mammoths. We worked by torchlight that consumed animal fats.

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Back to present times…

This family event was so much fun! We have some actual caves on our land, but didn’t want to wake any sleeping bears, so instead we used the closet underneath our basement stairs. It was perfect for our “cave”. It starts out spacious and ends up in a tiny crawl space, just like some of the actual caves the prehistoric people used. We had a tiny lantern as our torchlight and a carefully-tended candle to simulate fire. We put up cardboard on the wall, set out black permanent marker for the outlines and red, brown and white pastel chalks to fill our drawings in.

Cave paintings that were created during the Upper Paleolithic period occurred 40,000 – 10,000 BC. The first cave art was discovered in the 1860s, but not until 1092 was it accepted by anthropologists and art historians.

Below is some cave art of Aurochs (early cattle), in one of the most well-known locations – Lascaux, France. This cave was discovered in 1940 by 4 teenagers and their dog. The paintings are estimated to be 16,000 years old.

I am ashamed to say that we haven’t been doing many arts and crafts lately. Perhaps the fact that the Kraft Kitchen looks like a hurricane hit it? So I spent my Sunday cleaning and organizing our craft area, just in time for a Family Craft night!

Picking up on our Artistic Pursuits curriculum “The Way They See It”, we tackled the “Me Project”, where we make ourselves, using fabrics, buttons, yarn, etc… I decided to take advantage of this Lakeshore Learning People Shapes Project Kit I had lying around.

It was perfect! There are people shapes in a whopping 12 different shades of “People Colors”, so we really got to fine-tune the skin color to match ourselves. Which is cool, because our family does come in different shades of skin.

David, Satori, and I set upon designing our “Me” persons. We had so much fun customizing them, choosing our favorite colors and decorations. The hair in this kit was pretty cool, much more realistic than the yarn I was going to use. It even comes with googly eyes of different colors, not just black like you find in most kits. And just look at those cute little lips!

We made them into little puppets. Here Satori is holding up David and Satori puppets.

I’m back in full swing as Satori’s Super Homeschool Mom or Teacher. Kept my weight off that I lost while I focused on myself  the past few months. Last week with David’s encouragement, we decided to stop the unschooling-ish style we’ve followed for the past 2 months and get back on our schedule. Of course we’re way behind the schedule, but thanks to Homeschool Skedtrack, I was able to push the months we’re behind on out to Spring 2010. Love that program. We are going to try to add most weekend days, as I have high ambitions for Spring 2010 and I wanted to get some prep studies done this fall.

I got some great ideas for reading fluency, will cover later this week. Also reading up on fun ways to incorporate math, writing and more. Last week we reviewed all of RightStart Math and we’ll be moving forward now. Same with All About Spelling. Retention has been outstanding on everything.

For Artistic Pursuits, we combined Five in a Row by reading Harold and the Purple Crayon. Either someone has read this book to Satori the 3 years she was in daycare, or she remembers it from 3 years ago when I read it last. She knew everything that happened next…

FIAR added this book as a short lesson, and I’m happy, as it’s such a popular, creative, wonderful children’s book. We’ve read it twice already (we usually only do FIAR as 3-4 in a row, hehe). The FIAR manual of course made me appreciate the book even more. With our Artistic Pursuits program (art program not related to FIAR), we took a purple crayon and Satori set about drawing her adventure.

I tore off what I thought to be a super long sheet of paper off our roll and placed it on the floor for Satori to go wild. I was really hoping she’d be more creative, but she said she wasn’t as good a drawer as Harold. She had a great time anyway.

In this photo, as I’d hoped to illustrate, we get the idea behind vanishing point. The foreground shows the paper being very wide. The background shows it growing smaller. Had it gone on much longer, the lines would have converged in a tiny point. We also did some experiments of drawing perspective, drawing a book from a birds-eye view, and then from the ground.

First up, a little more about this book, which we are rowing with FIAR this week. As of last month, this book seemed to have gone out of print and was selling for $300! As of September, it is now back in stock on Amazon for $19.95, so if you want this own, and it is indeed worth it, I suggest getting it now! Or, be sure to check used book stores and such.

***I was just googling “Who Owns the Sun” and this very post is already on the first page of Google, I had published it ONE MINUTE AGO. Google rocks and they seem to love my blog.

Friday Satori replicated the glorious artwork of Who Owns the Sun? This sun image is shown on the title and on one of the first pages of the book.

We didn’t want to wait for normal watercolors to dry, so we used our new Neocolor II Artists Crayons, which are water soluble. They worked out GREAT!  We only have a small box of 15 though. I’d love a Wood Box Set of 84, or the Gift Set of 126, but $200+ is out of our budget now.

Neocolor

As you can see in the first photo, Satori then brushed a wet paintbrush outwords from the sun, resulting in our Who Owns the Sun sunburst!

A drizzly stay-home Saturday on a holiday weekend… I decided to pull out our Evan-Moor Literature Pocket – Folktales & Fairytales. There are 7 favorite stories, from Goldilocks to Little Red Riding Hood, and activities to do with all. You make a “pocket” to put your finished items in. The whole family joined in to do these activities.

David acting goofy. Here he is helping cut while Satori is coloring her first book “The Little Red Hen”.

The Literature Pocket cover page:

Doing one of the activities, matching animal sounds to the animals and making a book. Satori knew how to sound out all the sounds except for “neigh”.

Here’s our completed “Little Red Hen” pocket! Satori wanted to do another story immediately, but we will have to wait until next weekend.

Next, we did the first lesson out of Draw Write Now drawing books. We did a little duck way back in February for Ping, today, we did a hen and made her red to go along with our Satori.

Draw Write Now our fun drawing books suitable for Satori’s  young age, and also has some copywork, which we did not do today, all Satori wrote was the name of the book. Here’s her finished drawing:

After our reading and math lessons, we ended up having a colorful morning!

To finish off our last FIAR book we started a month ago, we read the Clown of God again and then had fun trying to juggle with colorful scarves. This was actually pretty fun!

I had these florescent scarves from Satori’s 4 year old birthday party where we had a “disco” theme, and I wanted to have glow-in-the-dark (with the help of a black light) scarves for the dance party. They are actually juggling practice scarves! They kinda float in the air for awhile, making them excellent as tools to learn how to juggle.

Okay, so Satori didn’t learn how to juggle today, but we had so much fun giggling and throwing them up and catching them, and it was a great workout!

A month ago, we had also attended the Renaissance Fair as a field trip for Clown of God. They had juggling sticks (devil sticks), and mama had a good time demonstrating to Satori how to do them, I used to play with these 15 years ago! I did not light them on fire this time though. These are fun for children, I should get a pair for Satori. She has since tried to juggle with pencils, hehe.

We also did lesson 3 out of Artistic Pursuits, which was free-form finger painting!

Getting really messy!

I mentioned a few days ago that we are going to start drawing lessons and practice every week. The main book I chose for this was Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes (founder of Monart art schools). I’ve read about 3/4 of the book and am excited to start. It is only 5 lessons total, not really a set curriculum, so it will be a bit confusing for us to get through, but I will do my best!

Mona Brookes specifically created this program for 4-5 year olds in a preschool setting, but people of any age can use it. We started out with a drawing “test” to see if Satori could copy a set of shapes. There are 3 levels of shapes and carefully detailed are the approximate ages that should be able to master each level. Satori rocked at the first level, she surprised me! Then she attempted Level 2 and got frustrated. Needless to say, Level 2 was not in the 4-5 age range.

Surprisingly, Mona Brookes starts you out with black markers! No pencils, and most definitely no erasers. The book explains why. So I gathered up all our black markers of varying widths, and got a set of 5 Prismacolor black drawing markers of varying widths. We both set about the initial activity of simply scribbling to get used to the different markers.

Getting used to our black markers

Then on to the Five Elements of Shapes.

1. Dots (roundish shapes filled in)
2. Circles (roundish shapes not filled in)
3. Straight Lines
4. Curves
5. Angles

I took a sheet of paper and drew examples of these 5 elements. Then Satori tried on her own on the left side of the sheet.

5 Elements of Shapes

We then looked around for examples of these 5 elements everywhere and attempted to draw objects around us keeping these 5 elements in mind. We were on our deck, so Satori drew a bird feeder, our umbrella shade, and I drew a stool.

We will work a bit on this every week. DWT is highly recommended by Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, the style of which I will be incorporating in our own homeschooling style this fall.

We are going to be sketching and drawing a lot more, I can’t wait for Satori to start her Nature Journal, so I’d like her to get confident in her drawings! I’m reading Drawing With Children (more on this later) to teach her how to draw.

She got frustrated trying to draw this picture, so I let her trace it. She used a Prismacolor black marker and then used Crayola colored markers to fill it in. Other than showing her how to trace it, I did not help at all.

Who can guess who this guy is and which country he is in? No gifts this time for correct answers, but in a few weeks I’ll have another contest.

After we whizzed through the “f” section in Explode the Code, we did an art project about FISH (hey it starts with “F”). We took this idea out of our new Usborne Art Treasury book. We are going to be doing many art projects during the week, and normally I want them to be all her own and not just “copying” another artwork, but this was too irresistible. This is based after Paul Klee’s “The Goldfish”. In his painting, the fish absolutely glows in the dark murky water and commands your attention. So we tried it ourselves… Mama sketched the fish, Satori colored it all in with oil pastels…

Then she brushed over it all with dark blue/purple watercolors. As you can see, the watercolors “beaded up” on the colorful oil pastel parts!

watercolor over oil pastel

And our finished artwork. Satori dubbed it “The Aquarium”.

Satori's Aquarium

Mom did get carried away with the watercolor and didn’t dilute with water enough, so we ended up having to brush it up to soak up some of the paint to have the fish show through. I think it would have turned out perfect if we diluted the watercolor more with water, but we learn something everyday. I kinda like the swooshes we made when we brushed it up, it looks like water currents!

Kumon little workbooks

Here’s a sample page of what we did this morning. Satori had to cut into the paper, but stop at a specific point. Then she had to fold up a little “cage” for the tiger.

Caged Tiger

Enough of that, let’s get to the fun stuff! Here is the first of our “slides”, a cutting activity recommended in Artistic Pursuits. She cut the line in the strip, then taped the end, and then walked the fairy girl to her friend. We had 4 other types, the others were wavy lines (fish to mermaid), curves, zig-zigs and more.

For this activity, I had used our fantabulous Magic Cabin catalog that I drool over every time we get it. Maybe we can’t afford all their cool, natural toys, but we can cut out their super adorable, whimsical drawings they use in their catalog! We had cute fish, mermaid, bouncy, swinging, playing children in no time.

Magic Cabin - catalog

Then, on to our “heart of love” activity, also suggested by Artistic Pursuits as cutting practice. (By the way, I placed all these activities in separate workboxes, so they were all set to go. We haven’t started the workbox system  quite yet, but I see it’s benefits and hope to get into this one day.)

Heart of Love workbox

Satori practicing her snipping…

Cutting pink strip of paper

We elaborated by dusting heart and glitter sparkles over the glue that we used to glue the two wax paper hearts together. Satori then ran up to a still-sleeping Daddy to give him his “Heart of Love”! It now hangs in his office.

Good morning Daddy, I love you!

I told Satori we’ll practice cutting, taping, folding, pasting a lot more now. She’ll soon be an expert in no time!