Not everyone has as close-knit neighborhood
as mine. My neighborhood is awesome. In a relatively small geographic area we
have lots of kids and lots of stay-at-home moms. We have an email list that we
use to organize events and play-dates. What is even more fun is when everyone
gets together for art projects.
Art can be fun on your own, with your own
family. But sometimes art is better with a group. Kids look at other kids and
copy. The younger kids try to do what the older kids are doing, and the older
kids get to be the heroes and role-models. There are a bunch of simple art
projects that can be done as a group.
Chalk Day
Chalk is a great art project. It isn’t
permanent (on clothes or the surface), and it gives kids a lot of options. All
you have to do to organize a chalk project is collect a bunch of chalk and a
bunch of kids. Then find a safe place with lots of drawing area. A park,
abandoned parking lot, or an empty street are great places. Then set a time and
have a bunch of people show up for “Chalk Day.”
If you want to do a chalk day on your own,
find a nice place to do it. We sometimes use our patio and sometimes use our
fence. I let the kids go to town with chalk. We cover our feet and walk around,
we mix the colors with our hands, we draw things we see, make maps of our yard,
and practice spelling. We draw flowers to attract bees, race courses for our
cars, and landscapes for our dinosaurs to play in. Then we either leave it for
tomorrow’s play or have a ton of fun with the hose cleaning it up.
Rubbing Art
Rubbing art is simple. Give everyone
participating a bag and tell them to go collect interesting parts of nature (be
sure to do this where there are not Poison Oak plants). Then you have each kid
sit down with paper and crayons and “rub” pictures of what they got. They do
this by placing the leaf (or whatever) under the paper and rubbing the crayon
hard across the top to get the image.
When we do this on our own it is normally
in conjunction with a lesson about leaves, grass, or other plants. Sometimes we
collect leaves and then look on the Internet to find out what kind of leaves
they are. Or we cut out our leaf rubbings and make a tree with the cut outs.
It is a lot of fun to do now that the
leaves are all out with Spring.
Collages
This time of year I have a lot of “left
over” art supplies. There are the feathers we didn’t use with the bird lesson,
the buttons, sequins, yarn, ribbon ends, colored paper, stickers, and glitter
left over form other lessons. One of the coolest projects to do is put all of
the left-overs out and let kids make their own collages. They can do this as a
group or as individuals.
We do this about 4 times a year, normally
when I have tons of left-over art supplies. I let the kids, or just my kid, go
to town with glue and the stuff and make collages. When we make too many, we
mail them out to family (who then does what they want with them). I make sure
to keep at least one out of each set for my son’s art book.
There are lots of fun art projects to do
during the year, and these are simply some of the more fun ones to do during
Spring.
Natasha Wunderlich
I’m
a homeschooling mom who made the choice to homeschool because I saw how
rigid schools were and noticed how fluid my son’s learning style was
and how hands-on his learning style was. We have been at it for over 2
years now (we started when he was 2) and are enjoying our time together.
Learning and teaching has brought us closer together as a family. I do
believe in structure and lessons, not simply free form schooling, but
those lessons are child-centered and directed by his interested. We are
moving on through Kindergarten and 1st Grade material now, and watching
him learn and grow is awesome. You can find me on: www.wunderfulhomeschool.
No comments:
Post a Comment