Satori Smiles » Art

Artistic Pursuits – Puppet Project

Angela — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 04:16:28 +0000

Satori and Mom created these puppets for our Artistic Pursuits Puppet Project lesson. This project utilized the “odds-and-ends” drawer, encouraging us to use those art scraps we keep in a special drawer.

It was a simple, fast and fun project, Satori made a bird, Mom made a cat (whiskers fell off right away). We then ran up to scare Daddy who was watching TV.

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Cave Paintings

Angela — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:52:49 +0000

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.

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Me Project

Angela — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:01:42 +0000

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.

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Back to being Super Homeschool Mom again

Angela — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:12:35 +0000

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.

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Who Owns the Sun painting

Angela — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:29:40 +0000

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!

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