Art through the Ages- week 1

We started our new themed unit for this term today.

Considering Mr10 has just done Artsfest
and started another term of art lessons
and the 3 of us are all entering the Jacaranda Festival Art Exhibition,
we have chosen to learn about art through history.

These are the title pages for our new art journals.

I

Cave Art
Last night whilst the boys were asleep I transformed our living/ school room into a series of caves by draping brown sheets and grey mottled blankets over things to cover up most of the colour in the room and break up the straight lines and angles.

Then I wrapped our dining table with brown paper and decorated the outside with cave art. There was a secret passage for the boys to enter into the cave and charcoal and ochre coloured soft pastels inside, along with an enormous plastic snake and various other animals- wombats, lizards, birds etc.

It was very exciting when they woke up this morning and found the cave.
Mr6 started adding animals as soon as he saw it, Dad and I were still in bed and he kept coming in, "Mum ,I just put in some more snakes" , half a minute later " Dad I just put in some turtles", then, " Mum I just put in some penguins" lol, " Now I put in Roderick " Roderick is his viking, "They didn't have vikings in the stone age" said I and it was time to get up before he filled the cave with all his friends.
Mr10 is much more composed than Mr6, he had great big smile and told me it was a really cool cave, but it would be good if we could get into it!

This is Midnight the Blue Tongue Lizard, a real stone age pet, come for a play.

Breakfast was fruit in front of the cave,
then the boys whizzed through Maths and English to get to the cave work.
They had to crawl in through the secret entrance
and they found the charcoal and oil pastels,

they started doing their own cave art immediately,
we talked about how small and cramped the space was and how dark it is in a cave,
What materials cave art was done with and what colours were available.
They did lots of lovely work on the walls and floor whilst I read to them about the art of Australian Indigenous People.


We also made some music with the didgeridoo and clapping sticks in the cave.


Mr10s page


Mr6 enjoying colour play


Working in our new art journals was fun, we looked at traditional signs and symbols and what they mean and we also tried our hand at drawing a rainbow serpent each.


Once we had finished for the day
the boys were keen to move the cave
into Mr10 bedroom and reconstruct it
around his bottom bed on his bunks,
so they now have a semi permanent cave
with a double bed sized soft and comfortable floor.

We have had a great day
and were dealing with the messy aftermath
when some non home schooling visitors arrived,
lucky she is such a good friend
because this homeschool household
gets very messy at times.