Week in Review - A Quiet Week & Rouault Inspired Art

This past week was quiet and filled with a completely normal schedule - delightful! After several weeks of travel and standardized testing, a quiet week was greatly appreciated by me. We are down to 5 more weeks of school for the 2010-2011 school year! We will be continuing with normal lessons through the first week in June and then we will be on summer break until August 9th. I am looking forward to doing lots of school planning and organizing around my house over break.

Since we finished our Astronomy unit study, we are not starting another unit study this school year. Our main work together this week has been doubling up on our United States geography study. My goal is to finish with our two year study in the next 5 weeks. This week we focused on New Mexico and Arizona. While we've really enjoyed learning about the 50 states, I think we're all getting ready for this long study to be done. The children are truly proud of their notebooks, though. They have been creating some tremendous notebooks during our U.S. geography study.


My youngest child finished his math program this week so he will be just practicing his multiplication and division facts on Facts First for the remainder of the year (and over summer break). Actually, all three of my children will be required to practice their math facts on Facts First over the summer. My middle son has informed me that I just don't get the concept of "summer break."


My oldest child and I are reading "The Hobbit." I am enjoying the book so much! I'm inspired to read the other three books in the Lord of the Rings series now. Mason is still reading through the Percy Jackson books - he is reading the fourth book now. I'm going to have to start reading the last book in the series soon to keep up with him. My youngest is now reading, "The Littles," a book which I'm not reading. He is using a Pockets of Time reading comprehension activity from Fortunately For You books to go along with the book.


As is often the case, one of our most enjoyable parts of the week was our weekly art lesson. This week's lesson focused on the art of the expressionistic painter Rouault (1871-1958). Rouault painted many of his paintings with black outlines and jewel-like colors so that the paintings had the feeling of a stained-glass window.


Using face cards from a deck of cards as inspiration, each of my children created their own Rouault-inspired painting. We used big pieces of paper for this painting project (18 x 24). After sketching out their drawings on a smaller piece of paper, they lightly sketched their drawings on the large paper.


After completing their sketches, they outlined their sketches in black paint.

Then, using a technique they learned called color-loading, they rolled their brushes in one color of paint thoroughly saturating the brush. Then they dipped just the tip of the brush in another color. Using wide brush strokes, they applied the paint to the different sections of their outlined sketch.

This painting technique created incredibly bright and vibrant colors. My youngest was particularly enchanted by the different colors that were created by using the technique with different paints.

Duncan, 8, said that he was most proud of this art project. He thought it was the best painting he has created all year. I particularly like the deep jewel tones of the colors that he created.
Mason, 11, added his own unique style to the project, as always! I like the mixture of blues and greens that he used in his background.Amber, 13, created a beautiful painting with an extremely rich variety of colors. I think all three of the paintings turned out really well and managed to capture a bit of a stained-glass feeling.

That was our Week In Review. If you would like to see what other homeschoolers were doing this week, check out the Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.