Children’s Games

Thursdays can be a kind of boring day since we have no music, art, library, or tech center. So, particularly since we’re usually just about finished with all our language arts stuff for the week by Thursday, it’s a great day for art.

Today we focused on an artist’s perspective. We used a couple of pictures to inspire us, notably Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Children’s Games.

We discussed how the artist appears to be positioned high above the scene that he is depicting. We talked about how this is sometimes called “bird’s eye view.” We contrasted that with “ant’s eye view” where the artist is below the subject. We also discussed near and far as parts of the perspective.

After this, we went out to the yard. Half of the class played and while the other half sketched them. After about 10 minutes, the two groups switched.

Many of our young artists observed and drew very carefully indeed!

 

Returning to the room, the students took their sketches and combined them into a scene using multiple points of view. That’s a technique that is often used by modern artists such as muralists. Many of the results were great!

The rest of the day was indeed pretty boring – checking homework, reviewing for a history test, working on comparing and contrasting paragraphs. But boring things are part of school as much as “children’s games” are!

Homework:   (1) Write spelling words 16-20 ten times each plus a sentence for each. (20 Do page 40 in the Practice book. (3) Complete the two chapter review papers for the first chapter in the history text. This is the MOST important of the homework assignments as the questions on the review are direct preparation for the test AND the students will be able to use on the test. (4) Do the odd problems only on the multiplication sheet. (5) Do pages 65-67 in the math book.

The word search is optional. Don’t spend any time on it until EVERYTHING else is done.