Rainy Day Art

It's been raining for days and days and though I considered building an ark today, I opted instead to pull out some tried and true art activities. 

First, we made slime.  Perhaps this isn't true art, but it sure is fun to feel that cornstarch change textures and to move your hands around in the goo! 

Mix 2 cups of water and a little food coloring with 6 cups of cornstarch to create a nice, thick slime. Run your fingers through and make patterns in it. --from Natural Childhood

Later, we made tissue paper mosaics.  This was my favorite activity a million years ago when I taught preschool during college.  I loved to sit at the table with the three-year-olds and use diluted liquid starch to glue shapes of tissue paper onto white paper. That's really all there is to it.  Just show the children that you can place the dry tissue paper on the white paper and then "paint" the water/starch mixture over the top.

Detailed directions for the tissue paper activity and some science connections are in Science Arts: Discovering Science Through Art Experiences.

More da Vinci

It's going to be a rainy weekend.  Tournaments are already cancelled.  So, I see some reading in our future.

Continuing our Leonardo da Vinci study, Mary Beth is reading Leonardo da Vinci. More complex than last week’s biography, this beautifully illustrated book details the life of one of the most amazing people who ever lived. Diane Stanley is an incredibly gifted author-artist and her illustrations truly make this book a feast. Patrick is fascinated by The Second Mrs. Giaconda; he’s looking for his own clues to the Mona Lisa mystery. And Christian, who has some experience of his own with writing entirely backwards, is enjoying poking through The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The writing in the book has been transcribed from da Vinci’s notebooks (where he wrote reams of notes entirely backwards).

It is interesting to me to see how different our da Vinci study is this time around. Last time we studied da Vinci (five years ago), it was very much a picture study. Michael is so intensely interested in art that the scientist and inventor held little appeal for him. Christian, on the other hand, sees da Vinci in a whole new light. There is little doubt that this is multi-faceted genius, indeed.

Leonard da Vinci

We’re taking a different DaVinci trail this summer, away from the popular culture. Instead, we’re going to take a good look at an extraordinary man. With Janice Herbert’s Leonardo da Vinci for Kids , as our guide, we are set to discover a great inventor, military engineer, scientist, botanist, and mathematician.

Oh, and he was an artist too, wasn’t he? Today, we’ll begin with da Vinci, written and illustrated by Mike Venezia. I love this series and am looking forward to Round Two as I use Venezia’s books as a springboard to picture study with my younger children, who have never heard or seen them before.