The Cutest Easter Eggs Ever!!

My daughter and I found these super cute printables to make excellent Easter eggs!!

Check out Mr. Printables website. Great stuff!!

Easter Crafts for Kids | Egg People | Mr Printables

Crazy, Sticky Condensed Milk Painting

So lately, I have become pretty addicted to Pinterest. I love that I can find loads of great ideas all in one place. Recently, I ran across this very creative idea for homemade paint. The recipe is quite simple - sweetened condensed milk and food coloring. I quickly picked up the ingredients from the grocery store and the experiment began. Now, I have a daughter who is up for anything creatively, so I knew this would be right up her alley.

Upon opening the condensed milk, I became somewhat skeptical. The milk was beige in color and extremely sticky. I wondered if I would be able to make pretty colors with this sticky, mess. I scooped out a bit of the condensed milk into a small bowl, added a bit of food coloring, and WOW! the color was bright and ready to go. We immediately mixed a variety of colors and prepared to create!

Painting with the milk paint proved to be a great time. My daughter & I loved the way the thick, sticky paint felt dragging across the paper. The colors were vibrant and very glossy.

I highly recommend giving this unusual paint recipe a try. It was a fun experiment that created some beautiful pictures! The only downside? The pictures are quite sticky and take a few days to dry.

Check out these fab Condensed Milk Paintings! I love the way they shine. Thanks for the great idea Pinterest!

Our World as Pizza!

Only in homeschooling would you make a pizza to help you learn about the different layers of the Earth! That's exactly where our science lesson led us today. We used our dough to represent the crust of the earth, shredded mozzarella to represent the mantle, shredded cheddar stood in for the outer core, and a small circle of ham was our hot inner core. It was so much fun and very yummy as well!
Thanks to R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey Earth & Science Curriculum for this great idea.

A Touch of Impressionism

Recently, Youth Art Month, which is in March, inspired me to add art history to our homeschool daily schedule. Our most recent lesson was on Impressionism. Impressionism is one of my favorite art styles to teach to kids. The bright colors and blurry images that are attributed to this style are easy and fun for kids to create. Gone is the stress of getting all the details of a face perfect. Fuzzy, unfocused images are perfect for Impressionist style paintings!

Impressionism is a style that began in France in the 19th century. It is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant. The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors.

For my lesson, I chose to focus on the art of Monet. We looked at many of his images including the painting Jardin a Giverny.

Monet's - Jardin a Giverny

This particular Impressionism project for kids is a collage and painting combo. I found the idea at Edhelper.com. Edhelper is a subscription site, but as a homeschooling mom, I find myself using this site almost daily. If you are a subscriber, you can find the lesson under Major Art Movements (Art Styles) - Impressionism.

This lesson begins with 9" x 12" pieces of blue, purple, and green construction paper. Tear the top off the purple sheet in a jagged way as to look like the bumpy edge of mountains. Glue the purple sheet on top of the blue sheet, lining up the bottom straight edges. Next, tear the green sheet in half to create the edge of the ground. Glue the green sheet onto the purple, lining it up to the straight bottom edge.

Prepare a paint palatte (I use styrofoam plates) for the student with the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and white. Secondary colors (purple, orange, and green) can be mixed from their primary colors. White can be added to make tints, or lighter versions of their colors.

Once the colors have been prepared, the kids can paint clouds in the sky, ridges along the montains, flowers, and grass. Remind them that the details are fuzzy and unfocused, but bold and bright.

The results are colorful and fun Impressionism inspired mixed-media creations!

My kids enjoyed this project. Even my son, who is typically a non-painter, participated in this one.

Spring is a terrific time to give Impressionism a try. The nice weather provides a great opportunity to create art "en plein air" or "in the open air" as many of the Impressionists did so frequently. Grab your art supplies and head outdoors! That would be creating art in true Impressionistic style!

We Love Our Homeschool Cooking Class!

My daughter loves all things creative. She has been asking me to add cooking and sewing to her homeschool day for a while now, so we decided to give it a try!

Halloween sugar cookies were our first project.

Mixing the dough....

Using our Halloween cookie cutters.......then off to the oven the cookies go!

Decorating the cookies with icing......and tasting them.........

And voila! Finished Halloween sugar cookies. Surprisingly, they actually tasted great!

Not sure what we'll make next. Thinking possibly muffins......

Turn Yourself Into a Comic Icon!

Check out my husband's latest portrait style. Taaaa Daaaa................. It's "COMIC STYLE" !

This portrait style is perfect for all social media needs! Facebook pics, twitter, blog profile pics- anytime you want to give yourself a little pizazz!

The portraits can be ordered for $25.00 from his website - www.cpbstudios.com

What do ya think?

Georgia O'Keefe Creations

Student Work

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was an American abstract painter born in Wisconsin. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Student's League in New York, and Colombia Teacher's College in New York. She was an art teacher before she became a full time artist. She was a leader in the development of the American Modernism Movement. O'Keeffe painted still lifes, massive flowers, the New York at Night series, southwestern landscapes and stark bones found in the desert. In 1939, she was selected as one of the twelve most outstanding women of the past fifty years by the New York World's Fair Committee. Her painting, Sunset-Long Island, was chosen to represent New York in an exhibition of the art of the United States at the World's Fair. In 1985, O'Keeffe was granted the Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan.

Red Poppy by Georgia O'Keefe

Pelvis With Distance by Georgia O'Keefe

In this lesson, students will be painting flowers or skulls in the style of O'Keefe. This can be accomplished quite easily by following these simple steps.

1. Find a picture of a flower or skull that you would like to paint. I usually find my samples on the internet.

2. Draw the flower or skull on your paper with a pencil. Draw it so large that it runs off the page. There should not be any empty background. The flower or skull should take up all of the paper.

3. Using paint, color the picture. Quite often, O'Keefe's paintings have either a warm or a cool feel. This can be accomplished by either using all warm colors (red, orange, and yellow), or all cool colors (blue, purple, and green.)

This picture below is being painted with cool colors.

This student has printed out pictures of flowers to use as a reference.

Here are some of our finished pictures! One warm and one cool - can you figure out which is which?

Good Luck with your O'Keefe creations! I know they will be beautiful - with such pretty subject matter and vivid colors they always are!