2018-2019 Homeschool Week 26: Mary Blair Art and Shopping for Next Fall

Next week Oliver turns 10.

Half of my children will have reached 

double digits. Crazy.

The Weekend Notes

Family time and sick kids sum up the weekend. We kept a very laid back pace with lots of rest, laughter, and more rest.

Monday Notes

Rebekah's sleep is still messed up from being sick last week. She wakes up in the middle of the night and is up for 2-3 hours wanting snuggled. Put her down and she cries, hold her and she is usually ok. I'm tired, but I know these days won't last forever and try to just soak it in.

School went well for a Monday. The 5th grade and under crowd was thrilled to start our science unit. We began Kingdoms and Classification from The Good and the Beautiful. Today we sorted buttons by rules we each made up (and tried to guess the rule others had used), figured out how to decide if something is living or non-living, observed two paintings looking for living and non-living things, learned about why we organize and sort things, studied Carl Linnaeus, learned about taxonomy, and read "Karl, Get Out of the Garden".

Monday afternoon I ordered a lot of our homeschool curriculum for next year. I have found that ordering in February or March is a good idea to avoid things being out of stock or backordered once convention season is in full swing (April-July). If you are like me, you are curious to know what was ordered, so let me tell you! There will be a few more purchases, but this was the bulk of what we needed. I will sort them by where I purchased the items.

• Math U See - While I own all the teacher's manuals and dvds, each child needs their own workbook ordered each year. Today I ordered: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, and another Algebra 1. 
• Ebay - I grabbed a second copy of  Exploring Creation with Biology by Jay Wile. Joseph and Emma will do this together in the fall and so we needed another book. 
• Home Science Tools - Dissection Kit for Apologia Biology, with extra specimens. Worm, crawfish, perch, and frog dissections are ahead. 
• The Good and The Beautiful - Language Arts 3 (Oliver - we looked at the samples and decided that he is ready for this and will be done with All About Reading level 4 by fall). Language Arts 5 (Daniel). Language Arts 6 (Joseph and Emma). History 2 (This will be used by Emma, Daniel, Oliver, Caleb, Mason, Samuel. Joseph plans to study a History of Science course separately.)

Monday evening Makayla decorated a cake. She works at a bakery/bistro and wanted to try some new things for fun. It was pretty amazing to see what she can do with some frosting and food dye. She doesn't want me to share a picture, so I won't, but imagine the top bursting with flowers in shades of pinks, mauve, and green leaves. If you look up 'blooming flower cake' on Google images you'll get a good idea of what she did.

Tuesday Notes

Daddy took over the homeschool morning while I took Tobias and Rebekah to the pediatrician for a checkup. When I got back I did science with the 5th grade and under crowd while we enjoyed Makayla's cake. Yum! There were a few kids to check in with on one subject or another, but overall, daddy handled most of the teaching today.

In the early afternoon the kids' piano teacher came for lessons. I played one very long game of Uno with boys who were waiting their turn, then did playdoh with Tobias for a bit before reading some more of The Brave Learner. Rebekah napped through all of this.

I spent a few minutes after dinner putting some books on hold with my library. I also ended up making a quick run to our library drive through to pick up two books that came in: Your Fantastic Elastic Brain by JoAnn Deak and Home Body by Joanna Gaines.

Wednesday Notes

I woke up just after 5:00am to see snow and ice outside. Rebekah, whose sleep has been wonky since last week, slept through the night. That meant I had better sleep, only up once in the middle of the night for Mason's medical care, and so I got up to have some quiet time just for me. I read my scriptures and then read more in The Brave Learner (my review is coming soon). Oliver wandered downstairs around 6:20am, around the time I decided to use up some ripe bananas. I made four dozen muffins (24 banana chocolate chip and 24 blueberry lemon). The snow turned to rain, hail, and sleet tinkling on the windows.

Over the morning there was math, math, and more math. Okay, we did other subjects as well. Joseph and Emma had a science experiment. Kids did reading, writing, grammar, spelling, and more.

Today a couple of kids joined me to read a book about Disney artist Mary Blair. We then created art using watercolor resist based off her abstract style from the ride It's a Small World. I've sprinkled a few of these pieces through the post.

In the afternoon I got an email with homework for my upcoming photography class. I'm taking a half-day class at a local photography studio on Saturday. Today was spent printing parts of the manual and adding tabs to find a couple specific sections in the manual.

Thursday Notes

A simply straightforward day today. Kids trickled down the stairs and the day started slow and steady. We read Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes by Nicola Davies (aff) for science with the 5th grade and under group. The kids were fascinated by how quickly some microbes reproduce and they loved the variety of shapes they come in. We will be pulling out our microscope next week to observe all sorts of things.

Friday Notes

A quick morning of school was followed by finally having a Valentine party with our friends. It was so fun to just hang out, talk, play, and snack together!
It is early afternoon now and Rebekah is down for her nap, Makayla is at work, and the rest of the kids are sitting in the living room and freezer room playing group games on their Kindles (Minecraft and War Robots). We're also in the middle of Mason's every afternoon hour and a half of medical care. I'm going to hit publish on this post and then it is time for some more research for books on the history of science for Joseph's history course this fall.

2018-2019 Homeschool Week 24: Heart Art and a Birthday

Saturday Notes
I drove Makayla to work in the snow and dropped off library returns in the drive thru on the way home before 8:00am. Some roads were clear while others were very snowy and messy, and it was very foggy because the temperature was rising.

One project I worked on today was administering assessments to kids to place them for next year's The Good and The Beautiful Language Arts curriculum. I tested Joseph, Emma, Daniel, Oliver, Caleb, and Mason. I already was pretty sure where the older 3 would be, just the next level up from what they are doing this year, and I was right. I plan to put Oliver into TGTB next year for 5th grade. I really have not decided on Caleb and Mason. They are already using All About Reading, but could possibly switch over. We shall see. I'm looking through the PDF copies of levels they would be in and deciding.

Sunday Notes
I forgot to take any notes today,  but overall it was a typical Sabbath day with family, church, and more family time.

Monday Notes
We had a solid day of school with kids working through their materials cheerfully. In history we had two lessons, my favorite part of the day. For the first lesson we learned about the history of flight, including the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and the Hindenburg airship. Our second lesson gave us a quick description of the Great Depression (1930s) and World War II before landing us in the Cold War. We learned about communism, the Warsaw Pact/Eastern Bloc, NATO, the countries involved in each, the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Airlift, and Gail Halvorson (the Candy Bomber).

Tuesday Notes
Today felt like everyone needed me for something, all in the same hour. Makayla and I discussed her literary analysis essay. Joseph, Emma, and I did some experiments related to Newton's First Law of Motion. Daniel and I revisited fractions with all four operations. Oliver and I worked together on long division. Caleb needed guidance doing his reading. Mason and I worked on a drawing from Draw Write Now book 2, which he will then do copywork for during the rest of the week. Samuel wanted to read to me as well. We made it through everyone's work and even baked pumpkin and banana muffins for lunch.

Today's history lesson was part two of our study of the Cold War. Today we talked about China's path in communism, North and South Korea's disputes, propaganda, radio broadcasts, Radio Liberty, Raidio Free Europe, and the attempted rebellions of Hungary and Czechslovakia from the Warsaw Pact.

The kids are enjoying our history lessons, and so am I. We move ahead in time to the Space race tomorrow. I am pretty sure we'll have to do some movie watching in the next week to go along. We will watch Hidden Figures, the first lunar landing footage, and probably Apollo 13.

In the afternoon I pulled out paints and some of my kids helped me make some painted hearts to hang up on our art line. I got this free lesson from Patty Palmer at Deep Space Sparkle here. If you check out her post she has a short video demonstration and a free printable. I spread the pictures out through this post. They were done by kids ranging from age 3 up to 14.

In the evening we pulled out different paint colors and did painted hearts round two. These used blue/green/yellow, with white and silver accents.

Wednesday Notes
A very gray and rainy day greeted us. I printed out the free 90+ page Companion Guide to go with The Brave Learner by Julie Bogart (affiliate link to Amazon) because that is my next non-fiction read. I am excited to really dig in and study this book for a few months. I did decide to attend The Brave Learner Conference in July as my continuing homeschool teacher education for the year. The best part is my sister, who is also a homeschooling mom, is attending with me!

Today is a special day at our house. Rebekah turns 1 year old! She lives up to her middle name - Joy. She is delightful and a precious gift we are grateful to have in our family. I am feeling a bit nostalgic as she is our last baby. That means we have the dubious pleasure of 'lasts' happening. Last 1 year old. I am not quite sure what to do with myself knowing that after nearly two decades we will no longer have a baby in the house. It is exciting, too. I have absolute peace that this is the family God wanted us to have. These children. There were so many years of having babies that we did not feel that peace of 'we're done', and having it now makes moving forward easier.

Homeschooling still happened as usual. Makayla finished a Latin translation with me early in the day. There were math and grammar lessons, writing assignments, brainstorming, spelling, and history. It was a good day's work.

Thursday Notes

Today's school work was a bit scattered. Everyone but Makayla did school work in the morning, before I took Jason to his shoulder surgery check up. Everything is healing fine. 3 more weeks in the sling, starting stretching in PT next week. Recovery will still take months. Hoping to be able to go back to work in May. When we got home from the appointment Makayla got going on her school work, but then had to put some of it off when our internet went down for the early afternoon. It eventually came back on and she finished up. She also decided to start watching the Psychology Crash Course video series.

In the late afternoon I did our last two lessons in The Good and the Beautiful History 1 with the kids. We learned about Ronald Regan, read some of his words, and listened to part of a speech he gave in our audio story. Then we learned about the splintering of the Eastern Bloc communist countries and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. We saw photos and read a story set during that time as well from our illustrated reader. The only assignment left for the kids in history is to write about some things they learned in the last few weeks of history. They will do that next week. Then we are on to some science units for the rest of the school year!

Friday Notes

I had a couple excited teens who woke up and got right to work on school. Joseph and Emma wanted to get work done early because at 11:00am they were going to see The Lego Movie 2 with my husband. They bought their own tickets last week and had been counting down. I dropped them all off at the theater and got home in time for Makayla to head to work. That left me home with the younger 7 kids. We put together this 300 piece dinosaur puzzle. A couple kids had Pokémon card game battles. Daniel helped make lunch.

Now it is early afternoon. Rebekah is napping, the movie goers are not home yet, and I'm going to spend a solid hour reading The Brave Learner and writing in the Companion Guide (that is FREE here). That's as far as I've planned for the day.

I was wondering if anyone would be interested in hearing about how our curriculum picks are going this year? I've also considered an update post on how each child's learning is going. Or if you have any questions you want to ask me? Feel free to leave a comment or email me and I'll try to answer them in a post in the near future!

Happy Friday everyone!

Warm February, Cub Scout Cake Baking, and Art Class

Me snuggling Tobias on Monday and ignoring my To Do list.

I love being a mom!

We enjoyed a 4 day weekend from last Friday through Monday. Random things were accomplished amidst playing outside in beautiful weather. Joseph had his 3rd Merit Badge Pow Wow for Boy Scouts. Makayla had a girls camp planning meeting. Daddy had school work. Grocery shopping was done. Church on Sunday. A Daddy+7 kids trip to the movies on Monday to see the new Lego movie. Piano lessons. A library trip. Just a nice long weekend of family life.

Tuesday we dived into school as usual. I think my favorite part today was hearing from different children about the books they are reading and the books on their ever-growing to read lists. My younger boys got the giggles when I read The Greedy Python to them. Daniel and Oliver made official decisions for their Blue and Gold Banquet cakes.

Wednesday we did life school, meaning the kids did their own choice of activities so long as there was some educational aspect. They were pretty creative in their explanations of what could count for school. I got to play Ticket to Ride: First Journey with several of my boys for geography - and by the end they were getting pretty good at remembering the names of the cities on the board and I had shared interesting information about them. ;)

Makayla spent the day shadowing a local veterinarian for a project. She loved it! Between watching appointments and surgeries, taking notes for a presentation, and asking questions she learned a lot. They invited her to come back any time. She saw a variety of surgeries - everything from declawing, spaying, and neutering, to the removal of an eye - and she still wants to be a vet.

Daniel and Oliver baked their creations for the Cub Scout Blue and Gold Banquet and decorated them. The theme is Wild West so Daniel made cowboy cupcakes with cute hats and a couple teepees.

Oliver made a cake with teepees and two fires for the Native Americans of the wild west. The evening had a lot happening including Oliver getting his Bobcat rank and Daniel getting 4 achievement belt loops. We were also treated to the Order of the Arrow dance group performing tonight - then joined them in a dance. They boys had a great time and have been dressed up as cowboys and Indians ever since.

Thursday was back to our usual school plans. One fun thing we've added to our week is YouTube videos. There are so many interesting topics my kids want to learn about or I want to introduce and videos are sometimes a great way to do that. For starters Makayla will be working through the Crash Course Intro to Psychology videos (40 videos). The rest of the kids chose to start with Crash Course Kids Space Science: The Sun and Its Influence on Earth videos (14 videos).

A lot of the morning Star Wars music could be heard from the direction of our piano. Joseph, Emma, and Daniel have been trying to play the theme (a very simplified version). They've made requests for music from Disney, Star Trek, and Harry Potter as well. I love that they are enjoying piano lessons!

Makayla also got to work on the PowerPoint slides she'll use in her live presentation for the online veterinary medicine class. She did this last semester too, so she's ready to dive in and get it done for the semester.

Friday (today!) we had Art Class with friends. It's been ages since we were all healthy enough to get together and everyone was thrilled to be together again.

We finished up an art project based on the book Over and Under the Snow, which felt rather ironic because we're having a snow-less, record-breaking highs February. The kids took the painted paper they created last time and cut out trees, added animals they had made at home, and then covered the entire collage with mod podge we had stirred glitter into.

Our second art project was to create moving fish. These fun little bony fish can bend and twist and flex. Sometimes it is the simplest things that are the most interesting.

The youngest kids needed a buddy to help with some of the work on the fish but were thrilled with their final product.

Our third project today was a Dr. Seuss inspired directed drawing. Half the kids chose to draw fish similar to the ones in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.

The other half chose to draw Seuss inspired cities. They were allowed to choose just drawing or to add color with chalk pastels.

Dinners this week + A Couple Comments

I don't know what dinner is like at your house. I'm just a regular mom with a larger than average family to feed. Sometimes I make easy meals or use kitchen tools that simplify the cooking process. Other times I choose slightly more labor intensive meals. This week had a mix of both.

• Chicken and broccoli stir fry and rice - This was an easy night. I put rice in the rice cooker which took all of 3 minutes hands on time. Then I put water, stir fry sauce, and some frozen chicken breast in the Instant Pot. Hands on time - 3 minutes. Broccoli was steamed on the stove top. Hands on time - 5 minutes maybe?
• Meatloaf, potatoes, corn, and green beans - The meatloaf went in the oven, mixing it up took about 4 minutes. Potatoes went in the Instant Pot, all I did was wash and cut them in half. Hands on time 3 minutes. Corn and green beans - we opened a couple cans and heated them up on the stove. Hands on time 1 minute.
• Chicken Enchiladas or ground beef tacos (depending on preference) - This is a more time consuming meal but will be eaten for leftover lunches for another day or two. I make the enchilada sauce from scratch in one pan while browning the ground beef in pan #2 and heating up canned chicken with some more ingredients for the enchiladas in a third pan. Hands on time: 20 minutes. When the beef is done I add black beans, spices, and tomato paste and let it simmer while wrapping the chicken enchiladas and putting them in the oven. Hands on time for this portion: 8 minutes.
• Leftovers or Cereal - I needed to clear some space in the fridge so I offered all the leftovers from various meals as well as fruit, salad, and cereal. Now I have space for more cooking!
• Tonight we will probably have pancakes for dinner. It's an easy meal that we always have ingredients for. I'll add sausage patties and fruit to the plates and we will be set.

I'm linking to Weekly Wrap Up.

Snowman Directed Drawing and Watercolor - Art Class

Today's art class started out with a forecast for snow - well, snowmen! We did a directed drawing with the children. Basically, one mom read directions and the other mom modeled the steps, pausing so the kids could each draw according to the directions as well.

The original drawing is in pencil. Sharpie traced over the pencil lines was the next step. Once everyone finished that step the sharpies were removed from the table.

Watercolor pans were brought out. This was the first time we've used pan watercolors in art class and it was a lot of fun!

Kids were instructed to paint the background for their snowman first. Then they painted the details. It was interesting to see the colors chosen. Many picked orange as the background color but there was also blue, yellow, and purple.

After our watercolor snowmen were finished we took a snack break, just one of the perks of homeschooling. During snack I read Over and Under the Snow (aff link) to the kids because we were beginning a second project today based on that book.

I'm not really going to share many details about that art project because we won't finish these up until our next class.

Today we painted background papers and did some large sheets of painted paper that will be cut into trees and other landscape features next week. The kids went home with the assignment to draw and color the animals they want to add over and under the snow. The only rule is they cannot use paper any larger than a 3x5 index card, so they can use several.

What art is happening at your house this week?

Books and Art Leading Up to Break

This was a beautiful back at the books week! I decided after last week's break that we should get back on our routine for the week leading up to Christmas. We will take off next week between Christmas and New Years. I don't know about your family but mine gets along better when we are in our routines.

We've done our usual math, reading, scriptures, book club reading (Little Women), writing, and so on. I realized this week that Geometry has been a much better experience with Makayla than Algebra 1, which I'm grateful for. She still doesn't love math, but she doesn't loathe it quite so much.

Homeschool Mom Tip: Little Women is a long book, especially when the listeners are ages 1-15. It's also not quite as adventure filled as some of my children prefer. It takes a bit to get to know the characters and really sort them out in your mind and begin to want to follow their stories. Because of that I added in some help to our listening time. Each day we listen for about 30-40 minutes. Halfway through our listening I pull down an old ice cream bucket from a nearby shelf that has been labeled "Read Aloud". Inside are chocolates. The bucket is passed around and 1 or 2 pieces are pulled out by each person. Because they know chocolate is coming they sit and listen to the story. By the time we pass our bucket around they are into the story and willing to sit and keep listening without much prompting.

The 6th grade and under crowd are pretty antsy about January's arrival because we will begin this year's science curriculum (up to now we've focused more on nature study). I have the experiment kit and book, Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics, sitting out where they can be seen. We got to do an experiment with Makayla this week in Biology and several kids watched in fascination. Then they wanted to do their own experiments. Nope, not happening kids. Experiments are special and we'll do tons of them in science this winter.

Wednesday brought art class with our friends. We went with a Christmas tree theme and did two projects. The construction paper trees were a 'Trim a Tree' project from Cutting Tiny Bites. It was interesting to see the different ways kids chose to layer and create trees. The biggest difference between the original project and ours is that I gave each child a full sheet of construction paper for their background, so they could make more than one tree at a time.

Fingerprint Trees was our other project. I found the basic idea for exploring positive and negative space in this way on Rhythms of Play. The original project made cards and used paint. We chose to use ink pads because they make so much less mess when fingerpainting with a crowd of kids, and they dry quickly. We also just cut our cardstock paper in two instead of making cards. The only unusual need to do this project is painter's tape. I had it on hand because we have plans to do some Piet Mondrian inspired tape resist paintings this winter.

Tobias had a milestone this week: he learned to pull out chairs, climb on them, and then climb on top of the table. Yes, we've reached that stage. You would think that after 8 other 13 month olds I would be ready for it but I never am. He is so proud of his physical prowess but has little concept of just how far down he will fall. I prefer when my babies wait until they are solidly into toddler years before discovering this particular skill. We're working on learning to safely back off the table onto a chair, with the reminder that 'we don't climb on the table'. He's pretty sure we should climb on the table though.

Other posts on the blog this week in case you missed them:

•  Our Favorite Books Read in 2016 - In this post I interview each of my children and myself to list our favorite books read any time in 2016. I also share the complete list of books we read for Book Club this year.
• Our Library Book Shelf, or how I get my kids to try new books regularly - Yesterday I shared about my favorite book shelf and how it encourages my entire family to try new books. I even share the list of every single book currently on that shelf, most of which are winter themed.

It is Friday morning and we have plans to make potato candy and play dominoes with Grandma. Hooray for family time!  I pray that your family will have a peaceful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Savior.

                                                        Merry Christmas - Jesus is born!
(Linking here and here.)

Art Class: Totem Poles, Marionettes, and a Real Live Snake

Today was another homeschool art class at our house. The kids were excited to get together and create, as always.

First up was a totem pole project from our Deep Space Sparkle membership. I cut some paper grocery bags for the brown paper and made sure the pieces were a bit smaller than our 11 x 18 white background paper. The first task was using oil pastels to create a background. This was relatively quick and easy to do.

Next was to make the actual totem pole. Each child folded their brown paper in half like a long skinny hot dog bun. On the outside of the bun they drew a series of large bumps, with a wing shape if desired. They cut the folded paper along this line and opened their totem. Their first job on the totem pole decorating was to draw dividing lines with a dark oil pastel at the indentation of each bump to divide the totem pole into several sections for creatures.

Kids then drew shapes (we had examples from actual totem poles) and decorated their pole. They were free to do any decorations they wished. The bottom left in the picture above, for example, has Darth Vader, Kylo Ren, and their light sabers. The final step was to glue the totem poles onto the background papers.

The marionettes were a project I was slightly apprehensive at attempting with our mixed age group. I knew several of the children would need help with tying knots, placing holes, and so on. I also knew it would be a very fun final product, so I was willing to make it work. Looking back, I would have probably tried to get a few more adults to help, but it was totally worth it. The kids LOVE their puppets.

We used the following materials:

•  1 toilet paper tube
• 1/2 toilet paper tube
• tissue paper
• 1/2 of a chenille stem
• glue stick
• hole punch
• yarn
• 2 craft sticks
• beads for feet
• Masking tape to secure sticks together and yarn on sticks

Tubes were covered in tissue paper, hole punched, and then came the pieces of yarn for legs and strings, a chenille stem for a neck, and some nimble fingers to tie.

Makayla, my oldest, also brought out her snake Olympia for the kids to pet and visit with. They were thrilled. Olympia was very well behaved as usual.

We love our art class every other week! Next month we'll be diving into clay projects. I'm excited to see what the kids create.

Art Class: Watercolor Castles, Scarecrows

Today we got to do another art class with our friends! We finished the castle drawings from last time by using watercolor pencils on them. Then we started a new project: scarecrows!

This project happened in a couple stages today. First the kids used templates to trace and cut out the pieces they wanted for their scarecrow. I had a stack of scrapbook paper available for them to use and nobody used exactly the same papers in the same way.

Once all their pieces were cut out they chose white or black sulphite paper as their background. Today everyone chose black paper except Emma. They glued the scarecrows to the paper and let them dry.

The last step some children chose to do was use chalk pastels on the background. You can also see that there were children who added patches to their scarecrows. Some chose to do faces and others did not. These made some fun fall decorations to add to our walls!

What art projects are happening in your home this week?

Art Class: Printmaking, Chalk Pastels, and Drawing

Today was the second art class of the semester with our friends. In my first post about art class I explained that the plan is to complete some art each time we meet and begin other projects that will be completed at a subsequent meeting. This plan seems to be working well. A few other things I did differently today were:

• Begin with our messiest project of the day and work toward our cleanest.
• Only schedule one painting project for the day.

Today's first project was to use the flower collagraph plates they had made with cardboard and foam last time to print flowers. The process is simple. Use a paintbrush to apply paint to the foam flower. Press the flower plate onto your paper. Wipe the foam off with a baby wipe. Apply more paint in new colors to the foam and stamp again. And again. And again.

Some of our youngest children chose to just use paintbrushes and skip the printmaking. The youngest child to choose to do printmaking was my 4 year old Mason. The kids liked this project more than I expected.

Our second project was to finish up the value jellyfish. Last time we painted papers with increasing color values. Today we pulled out the chalk pastels to layer jellyfish on top of the dry background. My 15 year old taught this lesson to the rest of the kids (ranging in age from 2-11). She demonstrated step by step how to make a jellyfish, how to layer deeper values of color in the jellyfish itself, how to blend, and how to outline for more definition after blending colors.

The kids had a lot of fun with this project! Chalk pastels make it easy for even a novice artist to be successful.

Today's last project was new and only partially completed, with no pictures to share yet. We are making castles using template shapes to layer in towers all willy-nilly. These will then be colored with watercolor pencils, painted with water, and outlined with sharpie markers.To help the kids picture the many possibilities for a castle I had printed about 20 coloring pages of real castles. We had these spread on the table to look at, talk about, and enjoy.

Children decided if they wanted a tall castle or a wide one and turned their paper accordingly. I then demonstrated the beginning - tracing the squarish façade (center where the door goes) onto paper. We added towers by tracing tall, skinny, short, and wide rectangles all over the page, always touching the side or top of another tower.

The kids looked at detail pages to get ideas on ways to draw a portcullis or gate, add rock/stone details, windows, flags, and more. Then they started adding details.  This is a big project (11"x18" paper so the kids decided to bring their paper home to finish adding details in pencil and bring their castle back to watercolor for our next meeting.

This project was really only attempted by kids ages 5 and up. The younger kids weren't interested. At our next meeting I will simply let them choose a castle coloring page to paint instead.

It was a wonderful morning of art, playtime, and shared lunch!