9th Grade Posters for French 2 and English

Here are a couple posters Rachel created recently for her first week back at school, and first week as a high school freshman.

Here’s a poster she created for French class about her summer holidays / vacation / break. That’s a great looking skyline of Seattle, Washington!

Here is another poster she created, this time for 9th grade English class. Students were ask to sketch a scene from “The Alchemist,” which was one of their summer reading books.

We definitely have a talented artist in our home!

Mathematical Artistic Dragons

Okay. I stumbled upon this video, and it’s absolutely amazing! By the youtube channel named Vi Hart, this video is kind of a skit narrated by a kid in math class. The kid is doodling, and creates some amazing drawings! If you watch the whole video….. you will be enlightened. WITH MATH ART DRAGON ENLIGHTMENT INSPIRAION SKILLZ like skills in fencing from metalfencepanels.weebly.com.

3rd Grade Back to School Night

Here are some photos from “Back to School Night” this evening at Quail Creek Elementary School in Oklahoma City Public Schools. Rachel recorded a short “Narrated Art” message with AudioBoo on my iPhone and described the first piece of artwork shown below.

Rachel's "Name Art"

Letter to Dad

Work Samples

Class Schedule

Cursive Practice

Timed Addition Test

Sentence Completion

Sentence Fragment Worksheet

More cursive practice

1st day of journaling

Writing Journal

2nd day journal

Journal entry about the Nile River

Sports Camp Learning this summer

If I Was a River Pilot

I volunteerted tonight to be the “class historian / photographer.” I’m thinking we might buy an older iPod Touch at a local pawn shop which can take photos, and then set it up to both post photos to a class blog as well as use it for narrated art recordings like Rachel made tonight.

Volunteer to be the Class Historian / Photographer

Sharing Sermon Perceptions Through Art

Rachel is now in the habit of creating illustrations during the sermon each Sunday in church. Here are some of her recent drawings.

Rachel's Art: Temptation

Rachel's Art: Truth or Fiction

This was the drawing she made on Sunday when she took communion for the first time.

Rachel's Art: Communion

Rachel is taking away a lot of ideas from church each week and I think it’s great she’s sharing her perceptions through her art.

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The Art of Lego Building

This is an Art History Paper Alexander wrote for his 8th grade art class. (His teacher asked him to hand write it, so dad is typing it for him so we can document it here on Learning Signs.)

Labyrinth, overhead view

ART HISTORY PAPER

The art of Lego building is not known or recognized by most people. Many people will say legos are just something I use to play with as a kid. In all actuality Lego building by adults and kids is fine tuned in the creativity side of things. Of course people building with Lego is only as recent as Lego itself which is fairly new. Lego building is something that requires a lot of skill and practice to do well and something many people have mastered.

Lego building in some ways is a lot like sculpting. When you sculpt something you are chipping or cutting parts away to reveal an object that the artist has in mind. Building in Lego is not as different as it seems. When building with Lego you start with one piece than add another on top of that. In many ways Lego building is a lot easier and you an create a lot more complicated and bigger art work than you can sculpting with clay or rock. There are different sizes, shapes, lengths, textures, detail, color, and the list just goes one and on with all the uses and ability of all the pieces that you have access to. There are also different types of creations you can make. You can build something in mini-scale just meaning in looks smaller or makes something huge into a more buildable scale. You can build in mini-figure scale which means you can use Legos version of a person and use them in your build. Another thing you can build in is just a larger scale which is too big for a mini figure to use. Then you can also had design creations that use different pieces in unusual ways to make designs or pictures.

There are many wonderful but right now I will only mention one. [sic] Katie WAlker is a AFOL – Adult Fan of Lego – and makes wonderfully detailed mosaics. Using small cheese slopes (little angled pieces) and tiles she is able to make intricate designs. This is really something amazing and incredible. You can find more of her work and examples by searching for eilonwy77 on Flickr.

Squares and parallelograms

Creating art is lots of fun and something I love to do. Even though they haven’t been around that long they are still great. Lots of very skilled AFOL’s are still creating amazing creations and art. So next time someone asks you what an awesome new art you can reply Lego building.

Evolution of a pattern, part 5

 

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Jack O’Lantern Carving Fun

Each fall our family looks forward to carving pumpkins into jack o’lanterns in advance of Halloween. This year we did it pretty early in October, and unfortunately the weather was so warm the jack o’lanterns molded before Halloween! These were our creations this year!

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As you can see, lots of fun was had by all.

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This was Alexander’s design, which was a stormtrooper from Star Wars. I thought this was a very creative as well as challenging jack o’lantern!

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Impressive Horse Sculptures

It was a treat to see this amazing sculpture exhibit of mustangs today in Las Colinas, Texas.

Mustang Sculpture at Carpenter Square in Las Colinas, Texas

There is a similar sculpture in Oklahoma City down on the river near Bricktown. These are photos I took this summer on the river boat ride.

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I’m not sure if the same artist is responsible for both, but they are both VERY impressive sculptures!

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Fun with art at Kaleidoscope in Kansas City

This afternoon my girls and I were able to have LOTS of fun with my sister and nephew, making art at Kaleidoscope in Kansas City. In these two videos, Rachel explains how she is making a puzzle, and you can see the puzzle cutting process.

This was some magnet art I created on the whiteboard.

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What a fun place to create and have fun!

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Lots more pics are available in our “Fun in Kansas City” Flickr set!

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Rachel learns to draw new things on Art Snacks

Today Rachel used a video by John Steven Gurney on the Art Snacks learning community to draw a reversible face. This is the “man version:”

Rachel's drawing

Turned upside down, this is the “baby version!”

Turn it over: It's a crying baby!

Rachel recorded an explanation of how she used Art Snacks to learn how to draw this, using iPadio on my iPhone.

Here’s the 2.5 minute video from John in which he shows how to make this drawing!
Find more videos like this on Art Snacks

Thanks to Kevin Honeycutt and many others who continue to make Art Snacks a vibrant community filled with creative artists sharing their work and ideas!

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