An ICAD tribute to home education

When I bought a magazine this morning, I was given a complementary copy of a well known national newspaper...rather than waste it, I thought I would just start snipping words that attracted my attention and put these on my index card. It ended up as quite a tribute to the joys of home education, so I thought I would post it on here!



The boys have continued another week with the ICAD Challenge. Here's a card each from their week:

Gman -



Waif -



The rest can be found in our Flickr set here.

Lapbook Crazy!

This month, the boys have mostly been making lapbooks...

Gman decided he would do a lapbook about dogs:





Waif plumped for a lapbook on birds:





Both boys worked really hard and are jusifiably proud of their work!

More pictures of the lapbooks can be found in my Flickr sets here and here.

Boning up on Bones

As you might be able to tell from the books in our Library Thing sidebar, we are learnig about bones at the moment. It all started with this rather excellent book.

It says it's aimed at 5-9 year olds, but Gman (11) has equally enjoyed doing the experiments and singing the bone song. Sample verse (to the tune of "She'll be Coming Round the Mountain":

Yes, my bones need calcium phosphate so they'll grow (uh, huh)
Yes, my bones need calcium phosphate so they'll grow
Yes, my bones need calcium phosphate
Or they'd never ca-ci-fi-cate
Rubber bones are not that great a fate (oh, no)!

This has inspired us to find out more about bones, and do further experiments. We downloaded the "Bones: An Exhibit Inside You" from the Children's Museum in Indianopolis and that had loads more ideas in too. One of the experiments was to make a model of a bone from the inside out, involving a straw (for the hollow centre), playdough with rice crispies in (spongy bone), snips of red and blue embroidery thread (for veins) and more dough for the outside (compact bone). The boys then cut a cross section of the "bone" and painted and labelled the different layers.



Science was never this fun when I was at school!! Because we are a gluten free household and we didn't have any commercial playdough, we made our own, using the recipe below:

GLUTEN FREE HOME MADE PLAYDOUGH

3/4 cup cornflour
3/4 cup salt
3/4 cup rice flour
3tsps cream of tartar
2tsp vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups water
few drops food colouring

Put all the ingredients except the food colouring into a pan and cook until thickened, stirring continuously. Let cool, then add the food colouring and knead in until the colour is evenly distributed and dough is no longer sticky.







If you are making this, I would recommend gloves for the dyeing bit, or you could end up with blue hands :-)



The boys are making lapbooks of their bone studies so watch this space for more bony fun!

In Praise of Sketch Tuesday

I have mentioned before that we participate in Sketch Tuesday over on Barb's Harmony Art Mom blog.  Each Tuesday, Barb sets an assignment of something to sketch, due in the following Monday.  These vary wildy and we always look forward to finding out what the next assignment is going to be.  We also look forward to the slideshow of the previous week's entries and enjoy seeing what ideas others have come up with for the assignment.  What I like about Sketch Tuesday is that it is participation without competition, so there's that feeling of being part of a group of people doing the same thing, without the boys feeling that they are in competition with others.  I also love that Barb allows parents to take part as well so I get to sit down and sketch with the boys every week too :-).  I never did much art as a youngster so now I'm making up for lost time.  It just goes to show that home education is a journey for the whole family, not just the children!

Anyway, enough talk, here are some of the boys' favourite sketches from the past five months we have been taking part:

Here are some of Gman's:



"Sketch Something with Antenna"



"Sketch something you use to treat a cold"



"Sketch something you see on a boat"



"Sketch something you make with water"

And some of Waif's:



"Sketch something with eyes"



"Sketch something you use to clean the house"



"Sketch something beginning with t"



"Sketch something you find in a toolbox"

And just to prove that I join in too, here are some of mine:



"Sketch something you see in an art museum"



"Sketch something with antennae"



"Sketch something you study in science"

Have I convinced you yet?

If you don't already participate, then head on over to Harmony Art Mom and check it out. There's nothing to lose!

Favourite Art Books

In the Snooze Academy, art always wins the homeschool day! The boys find it relaxing and rewarding and we all learn a lot along the journey. We get a lot of ideas for art projects from websites and blogs (and always link to these when we do) but also use books and these are a few of our current favourites:



Discovering Great Artists

This is an excellent book for finding out all about some of the greatest masters in the art world with one or two projects for each artist. They are graded by ability, by time taken and use a variety of techniques and materials, so great for ideas for using all the different art materials we seem to be constantly accumulating! It is a little short on illustrations of what the "finished product" might look like, but in some ways that is a good thing.

What's the Big Idea?  Activities and Adventures in Abstract Art (Art Explorers series)

We used the Impressionist version of this book extensively when Gman was doing his impressionist lapbook earlier in the year. We also have editions on Expressionist Art, Pop Art and Surrealism. They are all fabulous, fabulous books! Each artist is introduced by a section showing a piece of their work followed by questions about the piece which really get the children properly looking at and thinking about the picture. Then there are a couple of different projects for each artist with very clear instructions and pictures of the completed work by children of various ages. We recently did some "Picasso faces" using this book as a springboard:



I cannot recommend this series of books highly enough. They really are excellent.

Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists

Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists is our new favourite art inspiration book. This book isn't aimed at children but there are a lot of ideas in it that could be used by kids.  There are 52 different "labs", each giving a starting point for drawing.  They are light hearted, fun and whimsical, just what we like :-).  To get an idea of the sort of thing included in the book, check out the author's blog, especially the assignments and tutorials down the left hand side.