Everything becomes an Art Project

This week we have been studying the early humans, nomads. Sophie has really taken to this word and uses it a lot lately. Yesterday we listened to the chapter on Story of the world CD, we read/looked at a few other books about early people and what they did and how they lived. Sophie requests a project every day. We broke out the markers to make our own cave paintings. I cut up some large paper grocery bags and taped them up under the counter so it would feel more like a cave. We could have used paint but I felt safer with markers and since we don't use markers very often this was a special treat.

The kids had a great time tracing their hands and just coloring all over the paper. Henry particularly loved doing this project he did most of the drawing. He was working on this one for a long time.

Here is the finished project. Nothing like the ancient cave paintings we saw in the books but it was fun!

Today I thought I would try to do a Math project. We don't have a formal math program we just do little projects and everyday math kinds of things for now. I have a book called Teaching Math with favorite picture books and today I picked one of these projects to do. At the Library today I picked up Eric Carle's book Draw me a Star. While we read it, Sophie immediately noticed that it was a creation story. We had read the creation story this week as part of our study of the ancient times. The Math lesson was supposed to be on estimation but we never got to it instead we just practiced drawing stars. Sophie has always had trouble drawing stars and this book showed her how. She still isn't great at them. After we drew stars we discussed the artwork in the book and how Carle uses collage to make the illustrations. We broke out the construction paper, scissors, glue and crayons to create our own collages.
This was a big hit. Sophie and Ian loved each having their own bottle of glue and scissors. Sophie actually got the idea of making a picture out of the pieces of paper not just glueing them onto the paper.
These are a few of the colleges that Sophie and Ian did. Henry was asleep, thank goodness, for this project.