Mommio: Art Class (and music too)

The kids have been studying music on the recorder with Robin for a while now, and I have to say that they are sounding much better lately.  I am amazed that they can all read the notes and play as a group! Here's a picture from class yesterday. Robin was reminding them to tap with their toes to keep time, something they are still working on.

Then it was on to art class.  The kids were very chatty and giggly yesterday so to start off I had them sing their ABC's at the TOP OF THEIR LUNGS, just to get out some of that energy.  Here you can see Connor covering his ears as we sing...he hated every second of it.

After that I had them sing as softly as possible, just to prove that they were all able to speak quietly.  They all passed, except for Gabe who broke from a whisper to a shout several times.  No surprise there!  We continued our study of the Limbourg Brothers this week in art class.  Here are the animal sculptures that the kids finished for homework last week:

After sharing those, we moved on to discussing what the brothers were most famous for, manuscript illumination. We took a look at one of their most well-known series, the calendar pages from the Book Of Hours they illuminated for the Duke of Berry.  I used this short article from Wikipedia to take a closer look at the calendar and what each month portrayed.  Here is the one we studied in depth-

August (Departure for Falcon Hunt)

Then we used this basic lesson by Amy Bruce to learn about illumination.  Following the directions in this lesson we made our own illuminated letters.  On a square sheet of drawing paper the kids used rulers and pencils to create a border.

 Next they chose a letter (they all chose the first letter of their name) and wrote it large in the center of the page.

After that they each chose their own theme to embellish the letter, border and background with (still using pencil).

When they were happy with their drawings they used a black marker to trace over the lines on their paper.  By this point the kids had been working on this project for over an hour but they were all still very interested in it.

The next step was to choose a portion of their picture to paint with gold paint (illuminated manuscripts often had gold leaf applied to special parts of the pictures).

Last- the kids used colored pencil to color in all the areas of their illuminations.

They were all very proud of the finished product!

For homework they will illuminate their first names.  Next week we move on to studying Jan van Eyck and watercolors.