By way of some background; I have 7 siblings and we have a sort of loose book club that we keep going. We live all over the western US, so our club meetings are usually via skype or in a chatroom and only happen quarterly. One of my brothers who doesn't have children of his own suggested we read the Hobbit and include all the kids in the fun. (He is vying for the title of Most Awesome Uncle in the Universe.) He has even come up with drawing assignments with each chapter (he's a university professor, so I guess making assignments comes naturally) and has sent out fun riddles written in runes for us to decode.
One of the assignments was to draw hobbit holes. We decided to use our artistic license and do photographs instead.
M cut a bunch of branch cross sections, which the kids painted various shades of green. Then I glued/nailed doorknobs in the centers and made a few windows and whatnots. Saturday we went out in the yard and set up little hobbit doorway scenes and photographed them until our fingers froze into solid blocks of ice.
(Yes, we know that hobbits dug into soft earthy hills, not rocks like most of our hobbit hole photos depict, but at the moment our ground is frozen and the rock walls were so convenient. Also I know that they only built one level homes and did not build above other hobbits holes in the same hills, but I didn’t want to stymie their imaginations and it made for some nicer compositions on the photos anyway.)
The kids have a lot of happy, positive, good, magical
creatures in their imaginary play and now thanks to the Hobbit, they are
getting quite a few new creepy, evil, magical creatures in their
repertoire. The other day J (age 5) told
me, and I quote, “We (S & J) have conducted some scientific
experiments in our secret laboratory in
Fairy Kingdom. We cut open some troll skulls and discovered
that their brains only filled 1/3 of the space and the rest was filled with
foam. That’s why they aren’t very
smart.” Mystery solved!
5 comments:
Are you serious?! I can't believe these awesome photos and J's comment! I can't wait to see what your kids decide to be when they grow up (or should I say grow up more) :)
Not only do your children draw a thousand times better than me, but now they are officially smarter than me. Wowee! That is impressive. And I love what you guys came up with for the holes!
so nerdy cute! but the real question is did you like the book as much as the art project? because i might have to say the art and your children's imagination is way better than the book:)
This is 16 different shades of awesome.
Do you know that my wife has never read the Hobbit? And she regularly reads your blog, which means that she knows I've outed her in front of the whole world. (I love you, sweetie!)
That is such a fun idea for a family book club (and love the hobbit homes! Our kids all very into gnomes right now and I think that they'd love the hobbits, too.)
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