Grid Art, Snake Skin Under Microscope, and Our Week In Review

The drawing assignment for this week was a grid drawing. I just couldn't get into it. Those lines drive me crazy. Caitlin did hers, you can see it below. DJ has one printed and ready, just has to draw it out. Next week should be perspective, which is always hard. If you have been following this blog, you know that on Sept 1st I posted the Earth Kids project for this month. Tonight is the results night. If you go back in the blog to the first, you will see we were all gung ho. Put all kinds of stuff in our glass containers with colored marbles. It was so pretty. I actually wanted to see if root vegetables, like onions and carrots, would grow in the water with no dirt. I use them as compost and they do grow in the dirt without even being planted. But no, after a few days all they did was rot and stink up the water bad. So we added clean water, that did not help. It was quite gross. So, last Friday, we emptied out the jars, cleaned them, added fresh water and plants that we pulled out by the roots. One of them, in the tall skinny jar, is actually a potato. If you look real close you can see a small potato starting to grow in the roots. They have stayed beautiful for the week, and just needed some new water due to evaporation. I am going to leave these and see what they end up doing. There are some flowers in there too, both wild flowers, and a rose piece we pulled out. As you can see by looking at the jar, this experiment also shows condensation, and it also covered photosynthesis.  You can't see the tiny bubbles but they are there.

Today, we finally got to dig out our new microscope and use it. Again, if you follow along, the kids had found a snake skin at the springs, and brought it home. Today we put it under the microscope. The assignment was to look at it and draw what you see. There are two different shots, they look a little different due to the magnification of each. The third magnification no one could actually see anything or get it to focus.

Homeschool Art Lesson 3 Drawing Hands

Our third drawing lesson, was to draw hands. Hands are hard to draw, and as you can see none of us were brave enough to try a cupped or closed hand. As you can also see, all three of us decided to draw our hands holding nature. Mine is the one holding the tangle doodle snake. Why did I choose a snake? Because, I love to do the doodle tangle art, and I dislike snakes, but mine is beautiful. The kids picked a butterfly and baby Sea Turtle. I am not sure which lesson we will do this week, but I better decide soon, lol. Tomorrow is Monday. I think in between the drawing lessons, I might add in some remakes of the Masters pieces. The kids do no have to paint in their designs, I do mine, but I do like them to color in with colored pencils. My paintings are for sale in my Etsy store, and you can find the store banner on the right hand side of this blog.

Learn To Draw Christmas Designs

This is a new set of videos I have discovered, on learning to draw. I really like this instructor. If you or your children love to draw, or want to learn how to draw, these are awesome!

We have a fun relaxed week of schooling, this week. I love when it gets close to Christmas because we get to relax a bit. Today we are supposed to be waiting for Progress Energy to show up, that is why we have no lessons today, I am still waiting and getting irritated. If they don't come today I will not cancel another day for them.

So we bake two Christmas tree cakes today. They are both in the freezer awaiting decorating. One will be for 4H tonight, and one for our playdate on Wednesday. DJ can read a recipe, measure the ingredients, mix, and today even removed from the oven and checked for it being done. Caitlin helps add ingredients, mix and she loves to give orders too. We decided that on the once a month 4H meetings we will have cooking class, to make a special treat for everyone. Because it is cold we are baking. Come summer I will have to be more creative.

Caitlin and DJ also learned to wrap their first Christmas presents today. This was an interesting task, indeed. Thank goodness they each had to only do one LOL! We continued our letter addressing today as well with a few more Christmas cards sent out. If any of my husband's family doesn't get one until after Christmas I apologize, because he has not provided me with a full list yet.