Hearts and Trees: Mini Art Lesson

This time we learned about Claude Monet: Water Lilies (The Clouds). What an amazing painter he was. He painted more than 250 paintings, was a leader in the impressionist movement, his painting "Water Lilies" sold last year for over 18 million pounds (close to 40 million US), he had cataracts in his later years in life and still painted, he loved painting landscapes and many of them are of the same scene, they are just painted at different times of the day or seasons, and so much more.

Here are some sites we really enjoyed during our study:

Looking at Art: Seeing Questions

At this site there is a list of different questions to discuss art: Describing It, Relate It, Analyze It, Interpret It, Evaluate It. This really helped me to ask the kids different questions about the painting we were looking at.

Garden of Praise

This site has a WONDERFUL biography about Monet. It also includes worksheets (you can use these for notebooking pages), pictures of Water Lilies to color, a jigsaw puzzle of this painting to do online, and so much more. I just loved this site. I am sure we will use it in the future as well.

Slide Show about Claude Monet

This slide show show 14 different art works done by Monet. Each page has information relating to the artwork and/or questions to ask about the art work shown. We just loved this.

There is another slide show listed here as well. It show 39 of his paintings, but no comments. It is beautiful just to look at all the different paintings with out any texts, and does play classical music.

What are we using as a guide for our art appreciation studies? We are using Heart and Trees Clouds Art Show: Mini Art Lessons notebooking set. We added a little more to our study, but Amanda's Notebooking Set really helped me to get this study going. Thank You Amanda!

She also has 2 other Art Shows: Winter Art Show & Ocean Art Show. She doesn't have notebooking pages for these art shows, but she does provide the art work, suggestions on what to ask/do, and web link suggestions.

After we did our online research of Claude Monet and his paintings we did our notebooking pages. The suggested activity on the notebooking page was to draw a reflection scence like Monet does his paintings. We used Water Color Crayons.

Thanks for stopping by and reading about our study on Claude Monet and his painting "Water Lilies (The Clouds)".

Hearts and Trees: Mini Art Lesson

We purchased Clouds in Art Mini Unit Study from Hearts and Trees. The first aritist we learned about in this study is Vincent Van Gogh and his painting Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies. We did our artist study yesterday, but ran out of time to do the art project. You can read about our artist study HERE.

In this post I want to share with you our art project. We were to create a picture with threatening clouds in the style of the painting we studied above. Here are some picture from today's art project. Timmy struggled with the idea of what to do at first, but he did a wonderful job. *Ü* They all did a wonderful job. *Ü*

And this one is mine:

Weekly Report:

It has been a few weeks since I have posted an update. We have been pretty busy around here and had 1 week of almost no school (just the bare minimum got done) because I was so sick.

Nature Study

We seemed to get our Green Hour Challenges done each week. We have been having so much fun with these. You can go HERE to find out more about our nature studies. If you wanted to add more nature studies into your homeschooling, Barb at The Heart of Harmony has started these WONDERFUL challenges for us. We are LOVING these and are learning so much from them. They are easy enough to do and not intimidating like I thought they would be. Thank you {{Barb}}!

I picked up a couple neat books to read aloud to the kids: Owen & Mzee (wonderful true story about a baby hippo and a 130 year old tortoise and how they became friends) and Girls Who Looked Under Rocks.

Art Appreciation

We have started our Clouds in Art Mini Unit Study by Heart and Trees. We don't have a colored printer so I just sent in the pdf to the UPS Store and they made the copies for me and I went down and picked them up. They turned out lovely. We learned about Vincent Van Gogh and his painting Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies. We took some time to look at a few other paintings he did. My favorite was Wheatfield with Cypresses, c.1889 and Thatched Cottages at Cordeville is a close 2nd. I think I just love those colors and the style. They are very peaceful to me. The kids recognized a few of his other paintings from Atelier: Starry Night and The Bedroom at Arles.

Something I found amazing was that he painted so many paintings and only sold 1 while he was alive. It is hard for me to wrap my head around how he must have felt only selling 1 painting. "I" now want to learn more about this man to find out information such as this.

We were suppose to do the art activity with it, but Dad got home earlier then expected and took the Jessica and Timmy out dirt bike riding. So we will do this part tomorrow (Saturday). I will post this in another thread HERE.

Co-op

At Co-op, Jake and Holly have been learning tons about the Human Body. They did a project on the eye, created lungs, and more. They are always talking about different things about our body. For example, yesterday they were telling me they need to have wax in their ears and not to worry about removing it because our bodies naturally remove the wax all by itself. They were pretty firm saying, "You can't remove the wax in our ears, Mom.". Oh... Ok. *Ü* LOL

Jake, Holly, and Timmy have been busy creating wonderful art masterpieces at co-op as well. Jake and Holly did modified contour drawings of their classmates, clown paintings where they had to make a value scale using only black, white, and a color of their choice, and a fall farm landscape. Timmy was busy working on a crowd sport picture and is currently working on a clay animal creation. He will paint the animal next week and we will share pictures then.

At zoology we made bird feeder, homemade suet, identified different types of birds based on field markings, played a guessing game "What bird am I" where the kids had to use field guides to figure out what bird each team was, shared the migration route of a bird of their choice, and more. We are recording birds we see that are coming to the feeders the kids made. I am really enjoying this section of zoology because we are finally learning about birds. NO MORE INSECTS!

Miscellaneous

We read some books on St. Patrick's day:

We also planted a Amaryllis bulb indoors and watched it grow. We received this bulb for Christmas, but didn't plant it until sometime in February. Below are some pictures of this pretty flower. It finally fell over because of the weight, but it sure was pretty while it was standing up. This plant had 4 big beautiful flowers on it.
Here is a neat YouTube video that is time lasped and shows one growing. It was amazing. I saw it said something about the music (may be inappropriate), but I didn't have the music up load and couldn't really hear the words. You may want to mute it before watching the video. But man, the patients this person had to create this video. Amazing! I want to do this sometime. *Ü*

Here are a couple pictures from the past few week. First pictures is Timmy working on is Logic page, Second is Jessica's drawing of her cat Angel, and last is a picture of the kids during free time.

And of course we did regular "school" stuff.