Painting Music

Kandinsky believed that simple pictures were like little melodies and complex paintings were like grand symphonies. (from Discovering Great Artists)

First we listened with our eyes closed to a piece by Mozart (our composer for the week), Andante con moto from Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major. We thought about a picture the music made in our minds.

Then we painted.

By Carrie

By Carrie

By Thomas

By Abby

By Abby

So far this week: we've worked on finishing A Child's History of the World by Hillyer (normally, read aloud is not a part of Arts Week, but we're nearing the end of school and I really want to finish this book), we've painted twice, we've read about Mozart and listened to parts of our CD, we've read Mrs. Katz and Tush and All-of-a-Kind Family. Today we looked at the art in The Very Last First Time because it's an example of pointillist art and at the pictures in The Snowy Day because they contain different patterns and textures, like in Mrs. Katz and Tush. The 3 younger children are gone to fiddle lesson right now, but later this afternoon, I hope to finish our Shakespeare project.

Mrs. Katz and Tush

We did something different for Mrs. Katz and Tush today. We read the art lesson about design, patterns and texture in Patricia Polacco's books and discussed the different illustrations. I found a cat pattern here and used it to cut out different pieces of cloth. Abby glued the cloth to a blue piece of paper and used watercolors to paint around the edge of the picture. It made a nice illustration, don't you think?

Mrs. Katz and Tush

It's a really beautiful day today! Our church had a yard-cleaning day and 2 people cut our grass, too. Wasn't that kind? After Abby finished her schoolwork, she went out into the sunshine with Katie to hoe in the garden. Thomas joined them after he finished working at the church and Carrie has been outside cleaning out and washing the cars. Just a great day to be outside!

We've been slowly working on Mrs. Katz and Tush this week. We've read The Wedding That Saved a Town by Yale Strom (the only Jewish book my library had). We've talked about immigrants and I told Abby about why my family came to America from Ireland and England and Italy and David's family from Scotland. We looked at a big book we found at a library sale called Ellis Island by Wilton S. Tifft, which has great photos. We looked up Poland in the atlas and read about a Polish girl in Children Just Like Me. (This book has been a happy addition to our FIAR this year!) We're really enjoying All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor. The older girls have loved this book for a long time and it's sweet to introduce it to Abby! This afternoon, Abby is going to help me make Paska dough for rolls to take to the Palm Sunday breakfast tomorrow and we'll make a little dough without yeast for her to see how that works. And just this morning we read a book about cats.

Our neighbor came over to bring some hay to cover our strawberries and invited Thomas and Abby to see some new kittens he found when he was loading the hay. Katie took them next door and she made a few pictures in the barn. It was fun to listen to Abby tell me all about it when they got home! They have a cat without a tail just like Tush!