Learning Through Art

I am so excited to share this with you! This summer my husband and I decided that we wanted to pull our 8yo son out of public school and homeschool both him and our 5 yo. It has taken much prayer and research for us to come to this decision, but it has been wonderful so far.

I am taking a fairly relaxed approach to their schooling, making sure that the important things get accomplished daily, but giving them plenty of room for natural learning through play and creating with their hands.

I have wanted to incorporate art into their learning as much as possible. Our 8yo has been asking recently to learn how to paint and draw "like Mommy".... so yesterday we devoted our whole day to researching journal making and making him his very own handmade art journal.

We found this excellent video tutorial by an amazing mixed media artist (who I very much admire) named Tascha Parkinson.




After watching this video we were ready to get to work on our own art journals.... we just had to adjust things a bit to get a larger scale with our own books. We got our bristol paper and cardboard ready, and picked out our cool scrapbook papers.





Next we set to work gluing, and gluing, and gluing some more =).
Have to get the boys used to getting their fingers dirty if they are going to make art.



Then came the tricky part...... securing all of the pages of bristol paper inside the book. This was Logan's first time with a sewing needle.... and I think he did great!



After much work.... and thankfully no blood, sweat (well maybe a little), or tears.... we were finished!!! YAY!



Now to get drawing and painting in them!!
I specifically used the bristol paper because I knew that it would hold up well to pretty much anything we might want to play with.

We both learned so much in just this one project together. Not just art, but history, math, teamwork, following directions, and even more real life skills that will be useful for so many things in the future. And it made us closer as Mom and Son.