Little Things: July 2015

Friday, July 31, 2015

Linnaeus Teaching Gardens

I posted about the storytime in the gardens, but I never got around to sharing about our first visit to the Linnaeus Teaching Gardens in the spring!

We went with a couple of other homeschooling families and had a tour of the gardens one morning.

This tree was decorated with a chainsaw!

There are all kinds of pretty views!

They don't use any chemicals on the plants, so you can taste test! (I can't remember what this was called, but it was kind of like a cherry, I think.)

We saw frogs on the lily pads!

There is also a children's area inside the barn.

We went back to the storytime this week--and I just noticed that Jack wore the same shirt he had on when we went in the spring!

Looking for matching leaves

Another great thing about the gardens is that they're a short drive from the splash pad, so we went there afterward and played and had sno cones!

One on One

I have lots of time with my kids, but it's kind of rare to have one on one time with them. Since they did camps at different times this year, I did get more than usual this summer!

{Alice and me in the tape tunnel at the children's museum.}

Really, I just got about three afternoons with Jack since Alice's camp was shorter. He had PE one day and went to the trampoline park another day. One afternoon we spent at the children's museum, where he got to make a custom minifigure (with a Discovery Lab shirt!) as a souvenir.

We also went to Braum's for sundaes!

Alice used some of her time to go to Build a Bear and spend a gift certificate she had gotten for her birthday.

We also took my grandma out for lunch and pedicures one day. Alice thinks we need to do that a lot more often!

Printmaking and Andy Warhol

While we were learning about Roy Lichtenstein, we revisited another pop artist when the OKCMOA had an exhibit called Warhol: The Athletes. They offered a homeschool class on printmaking, so we went down for the afternoon and tried it out!

We started out with some time in the exhibit. I was glad to find that the kids (Jack, especially) remembered some things about Andy Warhol since we had studied him before and listened to his nephew talk about him, too.

Then we went back to the studio, where each kid had their own screen to try screenprinting.

I was excited about this, because it's a project I had wanted to try, but I wasn't sure how to go about doing it at home without spending a ton of time and money.

Their finished prints! This class was a lot of fun, so we'll definitely be watching the upcoming fall class schedule to see what other classes we can try!

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Artist Study: Roy Lichtenstein

Our artist study for April and May was on Roy Lichtenstein.

We used the Getting to Know... biography, Whaam! The Art and Life of Roy Lichtenstein, and Roy Lichtenstein: The Artist at Work. I also had the Lichtenstein page from Art History Paper Dolls on our fridge.

We tried several projects, including these comic words.

These landscapes were also fun!

I can't find a picture and I've apparently already packed the pictures we made, but be sure to try these Lichtenstein style portraits!

When we went to Crystal Bridges we got to see several Lichtenstein pieces!

A couple of weeks after we finished the study, Jack came back from the bathroom at Red Robin and told me he'd found a Lichtenstein on his way. Sure enough, there was one! It's always nice to know something stuck!

Friday, July 24, 2015

Van Gogh to Rothko

Now that I'm finally getting a chance to blog, here are some pictures from our trip to Crystal Bridges to see the Van Gogh to Rothko exhibit--in April! Between the regular collections and the exhibit, we saw works by many of the artists we've studied over the last few years.