Homeschool Talk: Gingerbread Art

Here's a fun idea that I had never thought of before. Our local science museum hosted an "Electric Gingerbread" event today. They gave us graham crackers and art supplies and we made our own creations. Then, they gave us LED lights and batteries and we lit them up. They are on display at the museum for the next 2 weeks.

This was so much fun! We glued the graham crackers together and decorated with art supplies. It was a good lesson in engineering (You couldn't let your house fall down!) It was also a very creative art project. Claire and I build one and Chris and Nathan built one. We had only an hour so I did most of the actual building on ours, but Claire went to town decorating it!

The boys working on theirs....

Claire busy decorating...

My and Claire's finsihed product with lights! We named it North Pole Wonderland.


Chris and Nathan's finished product. They used all white lights so even though they were lit up in real life, they don't look like it in the picture. Guess I should have turned the flash off. They named their Winter Cottage, I think.

This was so much fun and totally something you could do at home on a cold winter's day when the kids are bored!

Homeschool Talk: Easy Fun Art Projects

A couple of weeks ago the whole family went to the Free Family Festival at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. These are really neat! They have docents at different areas with different art activities for the kids to do. The theme was art from A to Z. So they had activities to go with artists with last names from A to Z. Now, there wasn't 26 activities, but it started with A and ended with Z.

I'm posting my kids' works of art with a little description because these activities were so much fun and could easily be done at home for a nice little art lesson.

One was a painting of a dentist office (I can't remember the artist.) The activity was to draw something dental related with white pencil on black paper. My son drew toothpaste on a toothbrush and my daughter drew someone flossing.

They also had self portrait lessons. The docent helped the kids draw the right shape face and told them how to get the eyes in the right spot, etc. They also had mirrors for them to use.

Since the theme was A to Z they had a really fun activity with letters. The child had to make pictures out of different letters of the alphabet. This one was really fun! And it would be so easy to do at home. Here is one of my daughter's. She made a lollipop out of a C and a drum out of an N. Sorry the picture is not horizontal. I have no idea why it turned out vertical once I uploaded it! Just turn your head a little and it will all make sense! :)

They also made Japanese style scrolls that were really nice, but I have no idea where we put those so I don't have any pictures of them. They drew a nature scene on a vertical strip of paper and then glued it to a more decorative and larger vertical strip of paper. (The decorative one could be some nice scrapbooking paper or thick wrapping paper.)

One particularly popular activity was a Piet Mondrain style picture. They had black lines cut to the size of the paper as well as red, yellow, and blue squares and rectangles. I thought this was a great idea. My kids vary a bit in age, but both of them really liked this activity.