art class at my house!

Okay, I’ve worked a super sweet deal with a local friend of mine. She homeschools her kindergartener and 2nd grader. She is very capable in most areas, but not so confident/interested in the visual art department. So she asked me if I’d consider doing an art project with her kids a couple of times a month and in exchange she’d bring dinner for our family on the day I teach her kids! What!!! Have I died and gone to heaven?!?!?! I hate, despise, loath, and abhor cooking. But I love helping kids get the kitchen table so deep in a craft project that we lose a kid or two!!!  We are holding art class on public school early release afternoons so that my kids can participate also.  Win, win!!

We did our first project last week. I talked for about 2 minutes about colors and mixing primary colors to get secondary colors and then mixing secondaries & primaries to get tertiary colors. I used my example project to show them.

Primary colors (red, yellow, blue)

Primary AND secondary (green, orange, purple)

Hold the two up to the light and you can see the tertiary colors like blue green and red orange.

I gave each kid (3 of hers & 3 of mine) 2 circles of clear contact paper (I used a CD as a template) and they cut up tissue paper and stuck it on the circles. Then we covered the tissue papered sides with more clear contact paper and cut around the circles again. We used brads to connect the 2 circles in the middle. When held to the light they could turn the two circles and mix the colors of the tissues in sort a kaleidoscope like effect. It was fun!

This week we did some more color exploration.  I gave each kid a fourth of a poster board with 12 squares (2.5 inches each) and a piece of cardstock with 12 one inch squares lightly penciled on them.

They picked their favorite color from our acrylic craft paint stash and painted the whole back side of the small paper with that color.  Then they picked 12 more colors and painted the squares on the poster board.  Lastly we cut apart the 12 small squares of their favorite color and glued them in each of the bigger painted squares.

 Here's my example

These are the beauties the kids made!

This gave us a chance to look at how opposite colors make each other vibrate or pop off the page while similar colors blend and are more mellow together.  We also noted that most colors can have a cool tone and a warm tone and they clash with each other (think mint & olive greens).

I couldn't be more excited about this new endeavor!  The challenging part will be the age differences; the official participants are ages 9, 8, 7, & 6, but the preschool aged siblings (5, 3 & 18 months) desperately want to be included in the fun; who could blame them, no?

There are just so many projects I want to do with these kids, it's hard to chose where to begin and which direction to take them!!!  I also wish I could invite every friend my kids have to join our group, but 5 or 6 already maxes out my abilities.  Maybe when my kids are all old enough for public school, I could become the homeschooling community's art class headquarters and maybe I could work it so I'd never have to cook ever again!!!!