Drawing with water

We have been spending a lot of time outside this spring and the kids have been engaging in a LOT of water play. Probably because I went kinda nuts with the garden this year and that calls for dragging the hose around the yard twice a day. I don't mind though ....I can work in the pottery studio with the garage doors open and watch the girls spraying themselves and making their own muddy mess in the gravel driveway. Cammy has gotten pretty creative with it. Today she started drawing with the hose. She started out drawing simple forms like squares and circles which was great....I have struggled to get her engaged and excited about form drawing all year with no success. Turns out I just needed to change up the medium. She likes drawing her forms with the hose.
Here is her triangle and square. These later turned into a magnificent castle complete with a nicely placed oyster shell door.




Trying to refresh the castle picture....."Mom...it keeps disappearing!"
Aha! Time for a lesson on absorption and evaporation and permeability and the list goes on. Learning and living at its best. Gotta love it.
She struggled a bit with a heart but I thought it came out pretty well. I love seeing her really getting into a creative groove and finding her own way to learn.

She was very proud of her square. She has pretty good control of the hose after experimenting with every setting and (accidentally) spraying inside the garage and the upstairs office (the window was open) and spraying mom and sister repeatedly. She likes the jet setting best for drawing with, but the fan setting makes the best rainbows. Who knows maybe she has a future as a firefighter.

Spinning in Circles

 Spinning in Circles

 

Our Monday morning chalkboard.  I love to draw a lovely picture full of symbolism for the week of studies and what they are supposed to be focused on. 

We are studying creation stories from around the world this spring.  I chose to focus on the circular form of the earth for a start.  Drawing and discussing the round form  helped us get centered.


We have literally been spinning in circles for two weeks now. I started off the new year with the intention of introducing some form drawing. We started off with two simple forms that are universally recognized among many cultures. We studied the spiral and the circle. I thought it would turn out to be fairly simple, we would draw and practice the forms and we would move on to new forms the next week. These two forms turned out to be more powerful for Cammy and myself than I could ever have imagined. We have been reading about community and the theme of being centered and of the connections we have with others. These two forms fit right into our current studies.

This list literally went on for another full page.

Circles were the clincher for Cammy. She embraced the circle wholeheartedly. She said the circle made her think of a hug:) So began our journey with the circle. I had Cammy make a main lesson book devoted entirely to circles. She included a circle picture dictionary with magazine photos of things that were circles with the words written beside them.

Cammy and Karma bubble painting.

We blew bubbles and attempted some bubble painting. We drew concentric circles by tracing cups, bowls, and lids from around the house. We drew abstract circle designs.

Here we drew concentric circles with sidewalk chalk on roofing tar paper.

We painted kinetospheres or energy spheres around ourselves. I had seen this in a book called Wonder Child by Peter Lorie. It's a book about staying connected with the magic that is childhood. It is one of my all time favs. The kinetosphere at the top is one of mine drawn with chalk on a sheet of roofing tar paper. When I was in college I couldn't afford canvas for painting class and I had found a roll of roofing tar paper at the home I was renting and took to painting on it. I love to paint and draw on a black surface much more than a white surface. The tar paper is also nice and stiff and holds up well to many mediums. I found that rolls of roofing paper were much cheaper than conventional paper so I still draw and paint on them to this day.

Cammy was so proud of her homemade paintbrush.

We needed long handled paintbrushes for our kinetosphere project so Cammy invented her own long handled paintbrush with a piece of cornstalk and some pine needles.

A flyswatter has a long handle...why not paint with that too.

Our kinetosphere experiment got very experimental indeed. The picture above is Cammy dipping a fly swatter in some of our paint.

This tickled.

We painted with our feet.
We painted with a sponge mop.

Here is Cammy circling herself with the paint to form a kinetosphere. It took her a while but she really built up her kinetic energy but it didn't stay in the shape of a circle for her. It went everywhere.
Needless to say ....when my husband got home he was slightly speechless.
Below is one of Cammy's kinetospheres. It turned out like a sun.

This kinetosphere was painted with a mop, a flyswatter, a pineneedle brush and feet.

We studied balls and motion and talked about kinetic and passive energy. We rolled balls and bounced balls. We made graphs of what bounced and how high.

For the second week we talked about how the spiral is symbolic of the path we follow in life. We drew spirals, we walked in spirals, we made spiral cinnamon buns,we looked at spirals in nature.

This was one our kinetosphere painting from week one and we just went in with our inspiration from the spiral studies of week two and painted the leaf together.  Cammy is getting the hang of drawing the spiral form without the lines touching.

Sweet, sweet love

This beautiful and deliciously sweet heart was the accidental result of introducing some waldorf form drawing again. Somehow I found it deeply symbolic of the love I have for my family. In wanting to start the new year off with some more deeply rooted rhythms around the house and a little less chaos I have started trying to implement some more Waldorf form drawing. This week I introduced the symbol of the spiral for our form drawing lesson. We started off the week by making spiral cinnamon rolls. We are starting off the new year with a unit about various creation stories from many different cultures and religions . I chose to introduce the spiral because it is such a universally powerful symbol for the path that we follow in life . I am finding myself being ever more grateful for this opportunity to be one of my daughter's guides on her life path. Yes I am her teacher...but I am able to be so much more than that even. I am loving homeschooling my children because I am able to really dig into a subject in so many more ways than she could ever be able to experience in most public schools. I am able to let her mind go to places that would be shut out by conventional classroom learning. If she is suddenly enraptured with a book about Egyptian Pharaohs in the middle of our week about American Indians we have our way of dealing with that in our house. We just use our time machine. It is my belief that this creative flexibility can be a very powerful learning experience. As for the form drawing I have a deep love of pattern and form and texture. Being a potter and artist I use lots of rich textures and patterns on the surface of my clay. There is something very sacred about being physically engaged with a shape or a line. I am always amazed at the forms that I see in everything....in leaves, shells, the soles of shoes, flowers, the landscape etc. I have done a little bit of this with Cammy in the past with not much success. She is usually able to draw the form but not with the kind of spirited embrace of the form that I am intending to try to imbue or impress upon her. I have simply tried to connect the form to something we are studying. When we were studying the globe and the compass and maps I introduced the cross form and an arrow. We drew a huge compass in the road with sidewalk chalk trying to be as accurate as possible with the directions. We studied the clock at this time as well and drew clock faces incorporating arrows. We laid down in the floor and made arrow shapes with our bodies. we played a game where we laid down like the arms of the clock and posed each other having to try to figure out what time our partner posed us in. My intention and goal was to try to physically engage Cammy with the shape and how it played a role in her life. This leads to a deeper knowledge...a mind, body, spirit connection. Last year was quite possibly the most powerful and trying year of my life. I want to imagine myself wearing a hand sewn super mom cape for having made it through my first year of homeschooling a six year old with a one year old by my side and hers and climbing on the table and into the cabinet There were some incredibly difficult things that happened to our family last year that we have been strong enough to come through stronger than ever and loving each other more and more. I love being a mom I do, I do! With all my heart!