Drawing With Children: Tiger Lilies

Last week, my fourth grade students drew tiger lilies, a lesson from Mona Brookes' Drawing With Children.

I didn't do the lesson as written because it calls for markers, and we didn't have markers. Instead, I had the children use crayons (yellow orange, orange, and red orange, and green yellow, yellow green, and green, and the purple of their choice). They also used fine-tipped black felt markers for the anthers and filaments, and for the black dots on the petals.

To prepare my students for this lesson, I explained that, in real life, things don't have black outlines.

We also discussed negative space and the children did the negative space activities in Brookes' book:

Next, using their three green crayons, they did these shading exercises from Brookes' book:

Finally, I gave them copies of Brookes' black and white image of tiger lilies:

The students grumbled and whined that the task was too hard, and I said, "But you're doing it anyway."

And they turned out beautiful work.

This was a two part lesson, with all of the excercises done the first day (1 hour), and the tiger lilies done the second day (1 hour). And I had students do a purple background for a triadic color scheme.

After the children had completed their drawings, they were all pleased with what they'd accomplished.

If you're looking for a book to help you teach drawing to an elementary schooler, I highly recommend Drawing With Children. 

Why You Should Play Outside In The Rain

Christmas Pageant Rehearsals Have Started

One of the songs that the Cherub Choir will be singing for this year's Christmas pageant is in Latin, so the music director made this poster to help the little ones learn the words.

The song is "Alleluia, Hodie Alleluia."

This means "Alleluia, today alleluia!" 

Alleluia today alleluia

Alleluia Christ is born

Alleluia today alleluia 

Today the glory of the Lord

Glory. Glory to God in the highest

Glory. And on earth peace

I love that the music director used an image of dominoes for Domino on the poster. But, being a child of the 1980s, I really loved that she used Gloria Estefan's picture for Gloria. The Cherubs have no idea who she is, and were just told that Gloria is a girl's name, and this girl's name is Gloria.

Have you started Christmas pageant rehearsals?

What I Do With All That Halloween Candy...

My four year old wanted to dress as a penguin again this year. Here she is with her friend, who trick or treated as Princess Ariel in the best wig ever. My daughter and I wore matching costumes, walked four and a half miles, and she was treated to half a jumbo ziploc bag of candy.

I recently read how one mother does something called the Switch Witch. She created a character, like the Tooth Fairy, who comes at night and swaps candy for toys. She even decorated a special basket for each child to leave their candy in for the Switch Witch. 

I work full time, so all I could think of when I read that was Who has time for that?

I also don't understand the concept of taking a child trick or treating, only to take the candy to a dentist's office for a "buy back" event.

If I take my child trick or treating, I'm going to let her eat the candy. I'm just not going to let her eat it all in one night, and I'm going to floss and brush her teeth afterward.

I let her choose one piece of candy per day, and she gets to eat it during her reading lesson. 

For example, this was yesterday's lesson (from The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading by Jessie Wise & Sara Buffington):

This particular page is divided into six sections, so I divided her piece of candy into six portions. That means a candy like a Tootsie Roll gets cut into sixths, and she gets to eat one sixth after each section. If she chooses a candy like M&Ms, she gets to have one M&M after each section, and the rest of the little bag at the very end.

While rewarding her for reading is very un-Charlotte Mason, training her in the habit of moderation is.

Happy Halloween.

What We've Been Up To The Past Few Days

1. I let my four year old daughter use a real knife for the first time Sunday night. She was making an omelet. We discussed putting the other hand on top of the knife, curving fingers, going slowly, positioning whatever is being cut flat-side down, and never trying to catch a falling knife.

2. While watching PBS, a commercial for a documentary about Queen Victoria came on, and my daughter said, "British Queen Victoria ruled over India" - a snippet of Classical Conversations timeline song. She's making connections. I love it.

3. My little guppy is really working hard at learning to swim. She's almost done with her second session of swim lessons, and I can't believe how quickly she's progressed from being hesitant to go under water, to this:

That is her in her "boy swim suit" - which came out of the Lost and Found on the day the wrong bag got taken to swim class. 

4. I dug out a DK Action Pack I bought a decade ago when I was teaching middle school history. They don't sell these anymore! :( My daughter had fun decoding the message in hieroglyphs. (A giant sphinx guards my tomb. Who am I?... The answer is Pharaoh Khafre.)

We also put together a model of a pyramid...

...which she wanted to wear as a hat...

5. And here is a shot of my baby ballerina :

Impatiens

We got the idea to germinate these impatiens seeds a month and a half ago, after our first Classical Conversations meeting. The science lesson was about seeds. So, we germinated impatiens seeds in a ziploc baggie with wet cotton balls. They took about 5 weeks to sprout.

This is an impatiens in a pot on our patio. I'm not sure what species. I scattered a mix of wildflower seeds a couple of years ago, and the impatiens keep coming back because they reseed themselves.

A flower's job is to make seeds, which my daughter learned from Ruth Heller's book The Reason for A Flower.

Impatiens make seed pods that pop open when you touch them, and for this reason, they are nicknamed Touch-Me-Nots.

POP!

Nature Study: Bees

Earlier this month at the Fresno Fair, I got a lesson from a beekeeper (not the one pictured above) at the bee booth in the agriculture building. Bees are fascinating.

If you're a Charlotte Mason homeschooler, you've probably read the bee section of Anna Botsford Comstock's A Handbook of Nature Study, but I'm telling you, Comstock does not do the bee justice.

Each hive has one queen bee. (Below is my daughter looking at the queen. She had a white dot on her, and she was surrounded by worker bees, grooming her.)

The queen is the only fertile female in the hive.

All of the worker bees are female, but they're sterile. The females are the ones that gather nectar and pollen, and females born in summer have a much shorter life span than females born in winter. In winter, fewer plants flower, but in summer, there is an abundance of pollen, so the females work themselves to death, dying with tattered wings.

Male bees are drones, and their job is mating with the queen. Bees mate when it's over 70 degrees Fahrenheit, so in winter, males are useless to a hive. They physically can't do anything but procreate. They don't have a proboscis suitable for gathering nectar and they don't have a stinger to defend the colony. Instead of letting them hang around, eating up all of the hive's resources, females pull them out of the hive and pull their little bee belongings out after them.

(Male bees die after mating. Click here to find out why. Ouch.)

This is what a beehive looks like in nature:

We had just finished reading A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, so I, of course, thought of Pooh trying to get honey by pretending to be a little black rain cloud. 

This hive was was huge. The beekeeper said it was home to approximately 75,000 bees and contained between 50 and 70 lbs of honey! (A hive will have tens of thousands of workers, but only hundreds of drones.)

My daughter feeling beeswax for the first time

As you can see in the poster above, a queen goes from egg to adult faster than workers and drones.

I was really curious as to why a bee becomes a queen bee, instead of just a worker, or a male. The beekeeper explained that the worker bees feed her differently. 

A queen is not fed honey or pollen (she's fed royal jelly) --> she doesn't get phenolic acids --> certain genes are activated  --> the activated genes make the proteins that build the rest of the queen bee body. 

Worker bees do get honey and pollen, and as a result, do get phenolic acids. So, even though workers and queens have identical genetic material, workers become workers and queens become queens.

(For a great article from Wired about what queen bees eat, click here, and for more information on the life cycle of the honeybee, click here. For some general information about bees from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - for beekeeping in Africa - click here.)

It's also extremely interesting to me that the queen lays the egg of the queen who will possibly kill her to replace her.

Queen bee cells are much larger than the cells of workers and drones.