Just when everyone seems to be over the cold that has kept us out of church for a month, Lula starts to cut her lower molars. At least she is doing it now...and will be finished with teething by the time Lucky arrives.
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| "Primary colors? What's that?" |
My Kindergarten/Preschool group managed to get through the secondary colors in two afternoons of art projects. I mostly skipped the stories that went along with the colors except green-I found some cute books about things that are about green things outside and green food. However, their favorite book was
Blue Hat, Green Hat. Oh my, Fiona and Daniel just cracked up! You can follow that link to Amazon.com and take a look inside at the silly turkey that couldn't figure out how to wear the clothes right. I personally didn't think the book was that profound, but the kids' laughter was so contagious, the book quickly became a favorite.
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| Mixing paint |
I had the brilliant (if I do say so myself) idea of teaching them the secondary colors by mixing paint in zip top sandwich bags. I have a set of acrylic paints left over from another school year just for this purpose. For each little kid, I put a squirt of yellow and red or yellow and blue in a zip top bag. I closed it up and then gave them to the kid to "squish" until either orange or green paint appeared. Oh, how fun!
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| Non-messy painting |
Then I opened the bag, turned it inside out, tucked their little hand inside, and taught them how to "splotch" paint with the orange and "smear" paint with the green. It was unbelievably
not messy!
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| Big Girl color mixing :) |
Evie loves art and wants to be an artist when she grows up. I let her mix paint colors in real cups with real brushes.
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| Autumn Leaves! |
One thing I really wanted to do was take the kids to the park and collect colorful leaves for an art project. It just isn't going to happen this year, so I had them cut leaf shapes out of their paint creations when they were dry (I mean, a couple days later). Then they glued the leaf shapes to a smaller piece of paper that is nice enough to store in their "portfolio."
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| Now this is a manageable, notebook-sized project! |
Today, I invested about...oh 15 minutes or so... on purple... I taught Evie and Fiona the
Purple Cow poem a la First Language Lessons style...
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| More color mixing! |
...let them discover that red and blue food coloring makes purple milk... (and did you know if you turn your milk purple, it makes it taste like goat milk? I didn't either, but Fiona insists that it does and she doesn't like goat milk)
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| Zombies |
...and zoned them out on
Harold and the Purple Crayon.
I also managed to start
Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? with the boys, read a chapter in Story of the World about the start of Islam, watched a National Geographic video about Mecca, and got the kids through their normal math and language arts. We started at 9:00 this morning and was finishing up around 5:00 tonight-it was a long day, but that's the way it goes with lots of kids at lots of levels and a mama who needs an afternoon nap!
