Weekly Wrap UP 5/31/19 -- To Kill a Mocking bird, and Mary Blair art project

We are on our last book for Literature: To Kill a Mockingbird.    For this book we are planning on completing an in-depth literary analysis, reviewing all the skills we have learned in the past two years .

We also reviewed 2 Crash Course Literature video before reading the book






We also intend to watch the movie once we complete the book.  This is the last book of our program and then Literature will be complete for the year.


For art we are learning about Mary Blair and her amazing artwork.  She work for Walt Disney and most famous for her work on It's a Small World ride.

Some of the books we look at while talking about this artist.  We also watched a video on you tube about Mary Blair and her work on It's a Small World at Disney.

 I normally chose 2 projects for each artist we do but this time around we took two weeks to complete one project.

Mary Blair's castle art appealed to me so I came up with a lesson plan to try to recreate it.  If someone else has done this I did not know about it and this is what I did.  (I normally give credit to any art ideas I use)
We talked alot about Mary Blairs color choices and shapes and how she put it all together.

This is my version of the art work

I had some large canvass and the boys drew their own version of a castle on it.
I gave the boys leeway on their castle design:)

MarioFan completed castle drawing.

Then they got to work painting.  I was pretty strict with the boys that there would be no sloppy work done on this piece.  I also said in order to get the crisp colors that they would need to paint several coats for each color.  The goal was to finish the castle painting but that didn't happen so the boys had some art homework in order to get ready for the following weeks assignment.

The halfway point.  

Next using sharpie markers I had the boys decorate their castles.  I gave them lots of leeway for this part:)

Then they chose the background color.  Again 2 to 3 coats of paint was needed to really get the vibrant color we were looking for

Lastly the boys used black sharpie to outline the castle and all the shapes which really makes everything pop out I think:)

Completed work

The next artist we are going to looking at is an Missouri artist named Benton.

Weekly Wrap Up 5/24/19-- Picasso art, Spanish project, Cher Concert and end of 11th grade

Whoo Hoo Firedrake completed 11th grade where she attends part time with straight A's.  We also got her ACT scores and she scored high enough to get into her first choice college with a guarantee of $4000 per year scholarship!!  We just have to come up with the rest of the money for college:(. Next year Firedrake only need to complete 4 classes to graduate.  We have decided the will go to the local community college for her last 4 classes and will also be getting a job to help save for college expenses.

MarioFan and I are a bit behind in completely 9th grade so we will be working into the summer months to catch up.  The last few weeks we have been working on learning about Picasso in our art lessons.

We always start with a few books to look at works of the artist and understand his work.  Picasso had many different styles of art throughout his career.  I found I enjoyed his earlier works so much more than his cubism style of which he is most famous.

I chose an art project out of this book which I have used before

If gives step by step directions on how to make a painting in the style of the artist.  Since both boys have pet Cats I thought this project might be of interest to them:). I have to work hard to find projects the boys like as neither have much interest in art and usually rush though the projects so they can go play, sigh

My version of the project

First we did a wash on the art paper 

redrew the picture as best we could

and began to paint...I wish I could say they took their time and didn't rush but .....

Finished projects!

For the next project I found an interesting project on Pinterest and you can find the link here .  I bought the project (it wasn't expensive) and we gave it a try.

Side two of the sculpture

Boys working on their ideas and I gave them a lot of room to be creative here.

MarioFan stayed pretty close to the drawing while his friend decided to go for alien faces with multiple eyes:)

I wanted to show a project that MarioFan and 2 other classmates did for their CO-OP Spanish class project.

MarioFan said they traced him for the outline.   LOL

They labeled the entire body in Spanish and English.

My husband and I went to a CHER concert for a date night

Opening act was nile Rodgers which my husband likes 

Cher was amazing and still wearing her racy costumes at 73 years old.  She was lip syncing for some of the songs but  she put on a great show!  My husband tolerated the show for me:)

Things are moving at a bit faster clip as we move into the our summer schedule.  Some of our extracurricular activities are slowing down which will mean we can finally get caught up with our schooling since we are so far behind.

weekly wrap up 5/17/19 -- Comic Con and last day of CO-OP

Yikes, it the last day for Co-op was this week.  The boys had a pizza lunch after Spanish class and I bought them a chocolate chip cookie to celebrate.  While Spanish class is over we are behind (due to my needing to take several weeks off for my Dad) on our art and literature lesson we will be continuing to met up on Thursdays over the summer so we can catch up.

This week Firedrake is taking her AP exam for Literature.  Hoping she does well enough to earn college credit!  Won't know for a few months.

This past weekend was the Comic Con convention which my daughter looks forward too every year! I enjoy going as some of the outfits are amazing!  Plus some of the talks are quite interesting.

Firedrake dressed up as Taako (in green hat)

Aren't these customers amazing!!

MarioFan favorite!!!

Captain Marvel was carrying a tabby cat in her back pack which was very cool 

bit hard to see but the cat is there and so well behaved.  She did say she let him out in the car to rest occasionally, so he wouldn't get too stressed out.

more great costumes.

Slenderman, I think, but this poor person had a hard time finding places to sit due to being on stilts all day!!  I had a good chuckle here

There was a costume show-- which drew the largest show.  

MarioFan loves the virtual reality station they have every year where .  He so wants one at home, but with the price of them, not likely to happen anytime soon

the kids participated in game show and won a small token

Both kids wanted to attend a talk on Pokemon biology

I found it very interesting that someone took the time to figure these things out.  but hey a little education no matter how you get it is good:)

Firedrake has final week next week and then her school year is over!  She earned straight A's again this semester so she is edible to drop one final exam from her schedule.  She has until Monday to decide.  I think she is leaning towards dropping Chem or AP Lit.

Weekly wrap Up 5/10/19 -- Matisse art projects and Literature

For Literature MarioFan and his friend are working on reading the book "My Family and other Animals" by Gerald Durrell.  The lesson plans includes writing humor.  After reading the book we watched an episode of the show -----which is based on the book.

We only watched one episode of the show and it was  horrible, nothing like the book-- everyone agree the book was so much better 

For art we have completed studying Matisse and his various styles of art throughout his life.  For the art projects I decided to talk about positive and negative space and how artist use that in their art.

Some of the books we looked at when we learned about Matisse

We did a simple paper cut out to emphasize the point

I found in my art drawer these scissor that I forgot I had.

The boys completed two projects, one that was free form and then one with a little more structure.  

The next time we met up we examined Matisse work a little more closely and tried to copy it but with own own twist to it

My only requirement was that a figure needed to be in the picture somewhere

Can you find the figures?  

I thought the boys did well on this project.  Next up we will be learning about Picasso.