Monday, October 19, 2015

Art Theme, Week 7 (Form)

We are nearing the end of our Art Theme, and thankfully we've managed to maintain our interest! First Sprout is back to enjoying the projects a lot more, especially since I've loosened my expectations and allowed her more freedom to simply explore the materials. For week 7, we took a look at the art element of Form and the work of artist Andy Warhol.

We were fortunate enough to find a neat book at the library featuring work of many artists contemporary with Warhol. (I believe that it was titled Art In the Time of Andy Warhol.) It had a wonderful array of painting, sculpture, photography, and performance art that were perfect for us to use in our discussion on form. We also read Josefina by Jeannette Winter, which is gorgeous book about Josefina Aguilar, a real-life Mexican folk-artist who sculpts and paints clay figures. We were inspired by Josefina to work with some air-dry modeling clay.

Later in the week, we looped back to Warhol with a narrower focus on some of his pop art prints. I found this super cool activity from Seeds Network that uses highlighters over top of printed photographs to re-create some of the funky, pop-art vibe of Warhol's work. I printed photos of each of the kids out on cardstock and let them go to town. It was lots of fun!

Lighter-colored markers and highlighters were great tools for the pop-art photo project.

First Sprout shares her funky, finished photo.

Second Sprout works to fill in her big blocks of space with color.

Overall we had a great week with our Art Theme (although some of our other subjects were still tough!). This will probably be the last theme that I plan for awhile since I want to give the sprouts an opportunity to explore some more Project-Based learning and self-directed studies. I'm excited to be moving in a new direction, but the planner in me is completely anxious. I know that Project-Based Homeschooling will be a big learning experience for all of us, and I'm super motivated by pouring over Camp Creek Blog for ideas. The sprouts have already been kicking around plans for what they want to study next, so I might be able to start sharing some of that process soon. In the meantime, we are on to our last (official) week of Art Theme by learning about the element of Space and the works of Mary Cassatt. We make have a wrap-up project or two for the following week to give us some closure, but we should be ready to move on by November. Ch-ch-changes ahead.

Until next time,

Happy Learning!

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