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. :)
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