Art and the Boxcar Children

Our ARTistic Pursuits book came in the mail and I quickly made a trip up to the craft store to get the rest of the things we'll need for the year. The book has 36 lessons, so if we do one a week it corresponds well to the Sonlight layout, which also has 36 weeks. A side note here - I plan on schooling year-round with occasional breaks for holidays and vacations. In the off-times from Sonlight we'll keep up with lots of reading and writing stuff on our own, since we were doing that anyway, and I plan to focus more on science, hikes, etc. As the kids get older I plan to let them have more time in the summers to pursue their own interests, but of course, this is all going to change as we go. :)

So I managed to find everything we need, with the exception of watercolor crayons. They had watercolor pencils so I picked up a pack of those to try for our first lesson. The book gives a brief lesson about what artists do, has the kids look at a famous piece of art and think about it, and then create something themselves. It's pretty quick and easy but good and so far she really likes it. The first week had the kids using watercolor crayons (or in our case, pencils) to draw something they see around them.

 L drew her purple watering can hanging from our fence, with green grass and blue sky and the black grill sitting on our blue deck. I drew the couch in our living room (I will be posting my stuff too, but goodness, I am about the farthest thing from an artist so please don't judge!). H's is.... yellow. The watercolor pencils were interesting. The colors didn't spread very well but they did make a sort of washy background behind the pencil lines.

The next lesson was drawing something from their imagination, which was fun. Our watercolor crayons finally arrived... I ordered a 15-pack from Amazon but they were mislabeled with the tag for water-resistant crayons so I had them send me another one, same problem, so I cancelled that order and ordered a 10-pack instead of the 15-pack of Caran D'Ache Neocolor II and they finally arrived... took long enough! They work waaaaay better than the pencils for spreading color! We drew the pictures with the pencils then colored them in with the crayons, and finished by spreading water with a watercolor paintbrush. L went a little heavy on the water, but still fun.

 L's is a radish king and radish queen in their growing box (she's currently growing radishes on our back deck), a butterfly, an angel with a trumpet, a fairy, some clouds and stars, and L in a fun dress.

 I drew a fairy watering a buttercup (needed more shading on the flower, it just looks like a yellow blob now)

H made these fun lines. Most of the time we do school when H is napping but sometimes he joins in. He likes listening to the stories and doing the art. He also works on learning his letters by using the starfall app on our phones.

Here's L working on practicing piano. I have started to teach her a little bit, but we don't do regular lesson time right now. I think she's still a little young, and I'm trying to capitalize on her self-motivation to let her learn as much as she wants to for now. I do expect each of the kids to develop at least a basic level of ability at the piano.

The first read-aloud for Sonlight is The Boxcar Children. I think the hardest thing has been not sitting down and reading it all in one day! The kids have been enjoying it, and L has been getting H to play boxcar children out in the yard. She pretends to be Watch, the dog, and H is Henry from the book. They found empty gardening pots to be dishes and grass for food and they've been having a ball. :)

Box Day!

On Wednesday we got a very exciting package... our Sonlight box! Hooray!

I don't recall if I mentioned it earlier, but I decided to order Sonlight Core A for L (who is five... she would be starting kindergarten in the Fall if I was putting her in traditional school). I also bought both LA1 and LA2. She's reading at a second grade level so I plan on using LA1, but adding in some readers from LA2 (because let's face it, the readers for LA1 start off VERY basic).

After pulling out all of the books and double checking our packing slip (everything arrived and was in excellent condition), I pulled out my new binder and all my instructors guides and got everything organized. Of course, after I had put everything in by week (core, LA1, readers2), I started L on her LA course because she was excited. We got through a week's worth in one day so I quickly realized that I needed to pull the LA Instructors Guide back out and keep it separate from Core A. I also found a smaller binder to use as my working binder, holding a couple of weeks worth of material at a time.

Next up, I sorted through all the books and put them in order by what week we start using them. Anything we use in week 1 I put on a shelf downstairs, everything else I put on a shelf in my room. Super simple!

I admit that it doesn't really seem like "enough" stuff to warrant the price tag, but I'm a big fan of simplicity, and a big fan of books, and I realize that the bulk of the price tag is allllll the books!

Now we're almost a week in and so far I like it, and so does she. :) She's blazed through 2.5 weeks of LA1 (like I said, the actual readers and the word lists are way below her level... the writing, however, is spot on for her). We've doubled up some things on some days and not done them at all on others, and it doesn't really seem to matter. I like the structured flexibility. I just write a little "L" on each part of the IG when she's finished it for Core A so I know what's done (then, in 2 and 4 years when my other kids get there I'll have an H and a P for them when they finish).

We're also still working away at math. She's having a little trouble with counting to 100 (she forgets the name for each new group of ten (twenty, thirty, forty, etc)), but is doing well with addition. She loves story problems, and sometimes wants us to make the regular problems into stories for her as well. :)

For the most part, except when L gets really into drawing or is super distracted, we are done in an hour a day. At some point I'll add in more structured science but probably not until the Fall. I also want to organize some more art projects. This girl LOVES art, but it's hard to motivate myself to get out the art supplies when it usually means trying to keep a 1-year-old AWAY from the art supplies. For her sake, I'm going to try to figure that out. I just got an awesome Usborne book called the Complete Book of Art Ideas that is fun. We also have the Usborne Art Treasury and several other art books from them that are all really fantastic. I also ordered the Sonlight Artistic Pursuits Book for grades K-3, but I didn't order the $100+ dollar supplies kit. It's probably worth it, but I likely have several of the supplies already at home.

Here's L being goofy and coloring the calendar that came with the curriculum.

Artistic Math

A reason to love homeschool... I doubt a kindergarten or first grade teacher would appreciate it if a kid turned in an assignment that looked like these. :) I, however, love them. I have her write the answer first and make sure she understands what she's doing but then she's free to doodle or turn her math problems into animals or whatever she'd like to do. She loves art - drawing, painting, etc, and I'm happy to let her enjoy her math as well.

I'm too lazy to rotate this in a separate program and can't see where blogger lets me do that, so you'll just have to deal with it. In case you can't tell, at the top there's a mouse and a fox, then a big beasty thing and a little animal with an extraordinarily long tail. :)

She hates writing numbers so I let her do them all crazy. Cool by me, though I think this was the slowest writing 0-20 I've ever experienced.