Famous Artists and their Artworks Bundle Set1

If you are learning about famous painters, art history and doing art appreciation in school, then this learning pack is definitely for you!  I finally published our first set of FAMOUS ARTISTS and their ARTWORKS in 3 part cards and picture book formats (to be assembled).

This Montessori-inspired Famous Artists Pack is perfect for learning about the works of arts of some of the world's greatest artists. It contains 12 famous painters from Renaissance to Modern Times. These materials are perfect for your Art History subject and Artist Studies (Montessori).

Art History: Renaissance Art | Leonardo da Vinci

Sharing with you our Leonardo da Vinco art projects.  Took us a while to finish this unit as we have tons of Leonardo works to explore.  Below, Vito offered to paint my portrait the Mona Lisa style.

Art History - Medieval Art

For Medieval Art, we made illuminated manuscript.  This art project was inspired by the Book of Kells (Ireland), a famous artefact on display in Dublin. Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin created around 800AD.

Art History - Ancient Art

Cave paintings are the focus of our Ancient Art studies.  We begin by reading books (see the list below), looking up some real cave paintings images worldwide, and working on a simple wall art project.

Playing with Colors and {Learn & Play Link Up #3}

Don’t you just love spring? The colors of the flowers brighten up my day.  The beauty of the cherry blossoms never ceases to give me a smile.  Reason why, in this week’s link up, I will talk about the things colors and the things that you can do with it, to see a mood.

Check out some of these fun activities from our previous link up that features the use of colors!

Featured posts for Playing with Colors this week:

Flower Water Tube Stamping by Montessori on Mars.  Wonderful activity for creating beautiful materials through color mixing using stamps!

Montessori-Inspired Color Activities for Toddlers from Living Montessori Now. A great way to introduce young children to colors.

Learning About Seasons from Planting Peas.  You will see how they use color variations to set the seasons.  Amazing!

Under the Sea Preschool Activities from Natural Beach Living.  I love the use of blue water beads to setup an ocean senosrial tub! The use of colors can definitely simulate a habitat!

Art Appreciation Activities from Every Start is Different. A compilation of art activities for kids!

This week on The Pinay Homeschooler, we create warm and cool colours! Mavi mentioned something like “It’s making summer and winter Mom.”

We are doing a lot of artworks at home.  Just the other day, we were looking at the masterpieces of famous artists like Monet and Van Gogh.  We talked about the techniques the artists used and how they set the mood of their paintings.  In particular, we talked about the colours they used during the daytime and night time.  In effect, we ended up talking about warm and cool colours which eventually brought us to this activity.

So Mavi and I practiced mixing paints to create our own warm and cool colours.  He was even more excited that we get to name our own colours!

Warm colours are colours of fire and sun, yellow and colour tones of red and orange.  Can you see the  names of his colours?  Yellow Golden Sun of Heavens and Lobster Bloody Red!

Cool colours are those of water, violet and colour tones of blue and green.  Love how he created his names:  Gods Light and Coral Sea Blue.

This is a simple activity that you can do with your kids anytime of the day! Less preparation but with much to learn.  Now with this knowledge, we can create paintings with proper mood settings! 

By the way, about the coloured tempera paints we are using. The brand is Gouache Liquide Tempera Paints. I am very particular with the paints we use at home because Mavi has asthma.  This brand has negligible smell and I love how strong and vivid the colours are.

So start making you colours now and have fun naming them!

Pin this for later! 

Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!

Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.

If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:

• Montessori Education
• Homeschool
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• Tot and Preschool Trays
• Fine and Gross Motor Activities
• Kids in the Kitchen
• Healthy Recipes for Kids
• Arts and Crafts
• Natural Living
• Free Educational Printables
• Family-Oriented Activities
• Healthy Living

Your post will be featured on each of our blogs where we will pick our favourite posts every other week. That means there is more of a chance that you will be featured!

Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:

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Artist Study ~ Leonardo da Vinci (Making Portraits)

I am rebooting our Artist Study and we’re starting with portraits.  Now this project was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. See our previous activities with Leonardo da Vinci here.

To know more about this genius artist and for inspiration, we first examine his life. We used this amazing book from the library, Levelled Biographies: Leonardo da Vinci[aff. link].  We enjoyed the book, and Mavi loved learning about Leonardo, not just as an artist but as a scientist as well. The book is appropriate for kids as it has a simple way of telling a biography and has lots of pictures in it.

Aside from learning about Leonardo, we also talked about portraits. I showed Mavi random samples in the web.  Then I took some photos of him outdoor to demonstrate what’s the difference between a portrait and an ordinary picture.  (You can also do this with your kids!) After which, we started making our portraits.  We used the DSS lesson for  the tutorial and some inspirations.

To create portraits, we used two mediums:  oil pastel and tempera paint.  Mavi wanted to use oil pastels (I never liked them!) as this is what they mostly use in school. So I guess he’s quite confident with it.

As you can see I also tried creating my portrait using the pastel but the black which I used for the outline started to mess with my peach coloured face! I just have to stop because my portrait is starting to look messy.

Now this is Mavi’s portrait made from oil pastel. He’s so happy with his work :D 

Second try, we used tempera paints.  I like using paints! Easier to handle and less messy. 

And this is our finished product :) 

Tempera paints, oil pastels and other art materials can be purchased through Amazon, Target or any craft store available.

Mavi pointed out he doesn’t know how to make a nose and a mouth … so we’ll he'll be practising more.

Now this is an activity that you can easily do with your kids.  You can use any medium available, pencil, crayons or watercolour.  Discuss what is a portrait and what do they imagine to be in that portrait.  You can also talk about the back of your portrait, whether they wanted to be indoor or in the park, under the sun, the beach etc.

Like my post? More activities here!

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12 Practical Life Christmas Activities: On the 5th day…

Painting a Monet-inspired Christmas tree.

Remember how I raved about the books of James Mayhew (the Katie series)? We'll one of our favourite books is the Katie Meets the Impressionist [aff. link]. We talked about the style of Monet and why he is called an “impressionist” artist.

 

And since its Christmas, we use the Christmas tree as an inspiration.

Below, we work together all the time. His and hers.

We dabbed and smeared our drawing paper with green for the tree. He used a pencil to draw a triangle outline as guide which is not visible in the picture.  Then we added details for the balls, lights, stars and presents under the tree.

 

Here’s my tree.

 

Mavi’s tree.

Now here’s a macro look of our tree…

                        

Color Gradient Painting

We try to have an art class every Friday as what I indicated in our October Calendar.    I bought new sets of paint last week, they’re 80% organic, non-toxic, water washable and doesn’t have the strong smell like that of Crayola.  So my son had a renew interest in painting and he’s been doing it randomly not just during Friday.

This idea was from a picture I saw in my Facebook newsfeed and I wanted to try it with Mavi, teaching him the colour progression… from light to dark or the other way around.

 

He picked the primary colours and the green. We added 3 drops of white paint each time we lighten the colours.  Son totally enjoyed this activity!  He especially loves the part wherein we changes the shade of the colour and he gets excited to see the effect. 

 

So here’s Mavi’s work and mine. I didn’t get to finish my work as I ended up assisting him in his colour mixtures.

 

As an extra work, he ended up mixing the primary colours…. to produce secondary colours so he can paint a rainbow. A few years ago we had colour mixing activities, you can pay it a visit as it became really popular and was featured in other blogs as well.

 

  

I’m so happy of his renewed interest! And with the new paints, I can allow him to do lots of art works without worrying of the strong paint smell :D

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Learning About East Asia

If you’ve been following my blog, we started our Asia Unit last month and so far we successfully completed our Southeast Asia Study.  In this post, I present to you materials and activities we worked last week for East Asia. 

Maps and Flags

As you all by now, we ALWAYS start our continent/country study with maps and flags.  This will familiarize the child of the subject’s location and each of the country’s national symbol.  For the East Asia, we identified three major countries: China, Japan and South Korea

Materials:

• Asia in a Nutshell
• Asian Flags Nomenclature Cards Pack

Again, we used Lego to recreate flags.  This activity is similar to our Southeast Asia flag activity.

Famous Landmarks

We have painting/crafts activity and Lego play.  Our tablet is very useful for this activity.  We used it to view pictures (for clear view) and watch videos related to our study. 

Materials

• Asian Landmarks Cards for other activities (3-part cards, fact cards).
• Lego
• Paints
• Pink Tissue Paper

Famous landmark for Japan is Mount Fuji

             

 

We chose Great Walls of China as our subject here.  Here we use our fact cards, which Mavi reads while we view the bigger picture in our tablet.

Calligraphy

We are using the Japanese numbers in this activity.  I painted the characters on papers and cut them for presentation.  Now Mavi has to make the characters as well.

After the activity, Mavi was like “Mom it is so difficult!”. 

 

Animals

We’ve studied Asian Animals previously, so in this activity we’re doing a Panda puzzle.  I printed this from DLTK Kids, and Mavi has to color and form the Panda according to the cheat card.

 

Arts and Crafts

We made oriental fans and learned how to make origami items.  For the oriental fans, we used paper plates, used watercolor for the background and black tempera paint for the details.  Our origami papers are homemade because the real ones are so expensive in this side of the world.  They’re colored crafts paper and I cut them to a size of 6 x 6 inches.

Books

We used lots of books, but here are my son’s favourites [aff.links]:

• Letters Around the World:  China --->> OUR FAVOURITE SERIES!
• Discover Countries:  Japan

For more Asia Unit please check my Pinterst Board Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Continent Study: Asia on Pinterest.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!
History and Geography

Bahay Kubo (Nipa Hut)

Bahay Kubo is square shaped house with no divisions, just a door and windows.  It is made up of local materials such as wood or bamboo or  nipa grass.  It is a Philippine icon and represents the Filipino culture.  Note that these houses are raised, for proper ventilation I guess since the flooring is made up of bamboo.  Another reason is to avoid the flood.

Yes I have seen Bahay Kubo and have friends and relatives who used to live on this type of house.  Until now, they still exist and I can’t wait to show them to Mavi.  He has always been fascinated with Bahay Kubo. Maybe he can’t imagine how people can live on just a square house. 

Thus, I decided to create a model using cardboard boxes from Book Depository. 

There are still people who lives in this stilt houses and I can’t wait to show it to Mavi when we visit the folks this year :)

I cut out the cardboard boxes into strips then stick them on a wooden BBQ skewers.

And here’s how the skeleton  looks like when all four sides are attached.

Adding the roof which is made up of cardstock and a wooden ladder here’s the end product.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

Books for Artists Study

I miss our Artist Study.  Mavi enjoyed our Artist Study sessions.  This was when there was no Vito yet and when my hands are not full :)   Mavi is very much intrigued on the lives of some greatest artists, he loves to listen to their life stories and the paintings that they made.  I have attempted this a million times, to reboot this lessons but the baby is a big factor. We’ll just have to set this aside and revisit this once Vito can join us.

Now I made this post to introduce two sets of books that Mavi and I really really love and enjoyed reading.  I found these in our library… but of course they don’t have the complete set which I dream of owning someday.  They are for keeps :)

The first set of the books are from James Mayhew. The books are all about Katie, who loves to visit museums with her grandma and when no one is watching, the paintings come alive.  My son loves this idea of Katie going inside the painting and meeting the characters on it.    We’ve read some of it and here are our favourites arranged according to how much we like them.

 

• Katie’s Picture Show 
• Katie and the Waterlily Pond
• Katie and the Impressionist
• Katie and the Starry Night
• Katie and the Sunflowers
• Katie and the Spanish Princes
• Katie and Monalisa
• Katie and the Dinosaurs

The second set of books that we also love are from Laurence Anholt.  This time the stories are all about children meeting great artists.  The books are more focused on the artist’s life rather than the paintings they’re made.  Now these books are pretty popular in the library so they are seldom available.  I plan to purchase them as gifts later on.  As I said, these books are worth-it.

Books we’ve read from the series:

             

• Camille and the Sunflowers
• Degas and the Little Dancer
• Leonardo and the Flying Boy
• Picasso and the Girl with a Ponytail

And there you go, my picks for studying great artists.  Hope you checkout the books using my affiliates.  Don’t worry, you won’t be charge or there’s no additional cost.  I will just earn a teeny weeny commission if you order through my links (affiliates).  And don’t hesitate to get your books from Book Depository because it is FREE DELIVERY NATIONWIDE.

Thank you and hope that this post helps.

Fun Under the Sun

If you are wondering what we're doing when the sun is up, here's a glimpse.

First I would take the boys in our backyard and do some little picnic.  The little one stays on his Mamas & Papas Baby Snug (Green) and plays with me.

Now for the big brother it's a little bit different.  Here you see him playing with his "fossil collections".   These are actually rocks in the yard that he gathered.  The Dinosaur Train inspired him to collect "fossils".  So these rocks are now piled in the yard.

 

After he checks his collection, I made him do some splatter painting.  A few days ago, I was telling him the story of Pollack, of how he paints using splatters.  After that we watched this video of a little girl who's famous of her painting.

 

Now that he is inspired, it's time to put his artistic side to action :)

             

Oh boy, how he love it!!  We just have to move to the grass though because it's getting messier.