Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Grade 5/6, Fall Term, Week 1, Day 2

Academic Work Today: Assigned Reading, Literature, California History, Science, Spelling, Art, Free Reading, U.S. History.

I wasn't thinking ahead when I made the syllabus for our fall term and had us begin this week.  Today was the last day of our summer movies series, so I had to shift some of our lesson work to the afternoon.  I find that this doesn't work well for J-Baby, who generally wants to do his own thing in the afternoon.  We had more friction than I wanted, but muddled through.  Last year we didn't buy tickets for the final movie of the series to avoid this situation.

Our focus lesson/project today was completing a lesson out of the book Discovering Great Artists.  We read about Giotto and looked at several of his paintings on the iPad (it's a handy little homeschool tool ~ I'll give it its own post someday).  Our project was to finely crush chalk with round stones and mix them with egg yolk (beaten with water) to create egg tempera, which is the kind of paint Giotto used.  Then we painted pictures and J-Baby also painted a rock.  It was an easy project and I had all the materials on hand, although I must say I cringed just a little at sacrificing two egg yolks from our wonderful locally and humanely-produced eggs.  I did save the whites and will toss them into a scrambled egg breakfast Thursday.

Another lesson learned?  Put the paintings where the dogs can't get to them: the Brat Dog thought my egg tempera painting was a tasty snack.

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