Cinque Terre - Abstract Perhaps

Making use of the watercolour painting I didn't like.

Watercolour - Surfers

Playing with some watercolours.

Chalk Pastel- Cinque Terre

 Cinque Terre in chalk pastels.

I first made an outline in black ink with photo as a guide and then decided to use watercolour, but I was not happy with the watercolour so I traced my outline in less detail and used chalk pastel the second time.
I am quite happy with the finished work considering I have limited chalk colours.

Lime and Coconut Friands

 Today the boys made lime and coconut friands and they were scrumptious.
We used a Womans Weekly recipe for basic friands and added two tablespoons of lime juice and 40g coconut.

A tulip.

Sunsets in the West

One of the lovely things about being on the west coast is watching the summer sunsets on the beach after dinner.

Seurat Dots for the Kids

 After discussing some of the elements of art and Post-impressionist styles, we dotted the colour in pages to see how the colour theory actually works. 
First up close blue and red and then at a distance, the optical illusion, we see purple.
This cool trick is part of the reason why I plucked Seurat out of the famous artists of history mixed bag. I could have started way back at the beginning, but I hope by picking a few interesting artists at the start, the boys will see how much fun art can be and not be bored by studies focussing on time periods and dates (as I was sadly). Hopefully this works!

 The notebooking fairy has some printables to use and we used these to complete our look at Seurat today.

 These books were also used.

Now that we are on Post-impressionists, we may as well look at some others and Van Gogh of course.

The Birds

Ever seen that movie "The Birds"?

Well this afternoon we had an experience with these birds, slightly more colourful and not as scary I admit, however they were everywhere, up trees, on the grass, swooping and dropping nuts on us and not one bit put off by our presence a few feet away.


These movie stars definitely own our front yard at the moment.
They are calling out..."paint me"!

Vivaldi and Venice Art

 Colourful canals of Venice by H.
This week we discovered that Vivaldi was born in Venice.
Where is Venice? What was it like in Vivaldi times and what does it look like now? 
First we located Italy and Venice on the map, then we discussed canals and a little (very basic) on Baroque architecture and cathedrals.

Luckily we have been fortunate enough to visit this wonderful city of canals and I have a clear picture in my mind, but we looked at some videos of the canals so that the boys could visualise what it is like. 


The colourful painted homes stood out, so we did a watercolour pencil drawing and included the mirror image in the water. I saw the idea here where they used pastels, but the pencils are quite quick and still turned out nice with the water wash and black ink pen.


This week we will be discovering the sonnets that accompany The Four Seasons by Vivaldi and will be listening out for allegro and largo examples.

Venice canal homes by J.

Growing Toms

A little green tom.

Artists of The Week - Vivaldi and Seurat

Our Blackboard this week.

Each week we will be looking at a music "artist" and a painter in more detail.
I got these great printables from Practical Pages (here) which we will base our studies on.
This week we will pick the most famous (I think) of Vivaldi's work...Four Seasons (spring) and become familiar with it by listening every day.
We have already done a pointillism style of painting, so now we will look at the life of Georges Seurat.

Carving Stamps

 This weekend I managed to put some time aside for a few creative activities, including stamp carving from rubber. The above is my duck Diddle.
The boys have been drawing in the mornings, mostly Mr Men characters, so I decided to do the worm from the books...

Scones and Paper Tube Craft

The boys made some yummy scones to go with our fig jam and connected some paper tubes for marbles...

Art - Colour and Pointillism

 Mangroves by H.

 We started to look at the painting style of Georges Seurat (pointillism in particular) today after discussing the Colour wheel again in detail, primary, secondary, tertiary colour mixing, value, complimentary colours etc.
This great blog has some wonderful art resources which free! 
We are very thankful that bloggers are so generous to share such great information.
Then we tried some pointillism with Q tips.

 Albatros by J.

I used some resources from here for the art lesson.

Mangroves - A Quick Look

 Today we looked at Mangroves, those plants that live in the brackish water of the very important ecosystem.
After visiting  mangrove ecosystem we recalled what we had read and seen and discussed the following...
-what are they, how do they survive in salt water?
- where are they found?
- what do they do?
- what food chains and food webs in this ecosystem?
- what threatens a mangrove ecosystem?

 The boys played with different food chains and we took items away and worked out how this would affect the system...

I used some of these resources from Marine Parks WA and we watched a few videos on mangroves on the net.
Next we move on to the Seagrasses and we have some of those local to us also  which is fantastic.

Fig and Grape Jam

I don't normally eat figs and don't normally make jam. 
Perhaps it is because I have never had a nice fig? 
Well today we were given some figs fresh off a tree and we decided to turn them into jam (they were very ripe).I also had some extremely juicy red seedless grapes which were not very sweet, so I added the handful in to the pot with the 6 figs and 1/3rd cup castor sugar (probably needs less with sweet grapes), orange rind and whole orange juice, and a touch of water. 
This mix simmered for about an hour until it reduced and set (I guess). 
We were all overwhelmed at how yummy it tasted, so we had a little with ice cream. 
I think we need to get some more figs! Why haven't we tried this before!

The sunset that day matched the jam (smoke filled the sky from the bushfires).

2012 National Year of Reading

 The National Year of Reading 2012 launch was on in Mandurah today, so we went along to listen to some readings from "The Magic Pudding", did some colouring, ate some cupcakes, had our photo taken for the newspaper and H had his face painted.
I was astounded to find out that 46% of Australians can't read very well (ie newspapers, recipes) see here for more on that, but I can understand why. 
We value reading and more importantly think it is fun, so spread the word...READING IS FUN!

 Some competition entries.

 I think he really enjoyed falling asleep.

LOVE IS...

This Week is Mangrove Week...

 A great way to start our study of mangroves is with a visit to some in Bunbury.

 We covered ourselves in insect repellant (Ross River Virus is going around they say) and walked, listened and read and looked.

 We could hear birds but didn't see many, however many birds come here in summer from the Northern Hemisphere to nest.

 We had a look around Bunbury and saw the dolphins.

Now we understand what Mangroves look like, we can learn about them in greater depth.