Day #71/175 Days - Fine Arts Co-Op

We covered the following today in music....

• saxophone
• trumpet

• Chopin

The boys were slightly impressed at the pretty sad tones I made come from the trumpet. There were some minor colds and such amongst the boys so they didn't get to try. They created mini-books for both instruments and for Chopin. We listened to various tracks to hear the instruments and Chopin's work.

Can you tell we are working with boys and ones that do not want to write much?

After a short break we tackled art. We watched a video on Christian Artists. This is taught by Barry Stebbing. He does a great job sharing his knowledge with the children. Then we moved on to the "Fundamentals of Drawing." These DVDs are very similar to the three day art classes that Mr. Stebbing teaches.  Lego-Man and Conductor participated in one a few years ago. Only Lego-Man remembers any of it though. 

 Photos of the boys working on their art lesson. 

The artist we studied today was Vincent van Gogh. We watched two YouTube videos. This one that showed lots of van Gogh's works and this one of a very adorable five year old girl recreating the moon in van Gogh's painting. We also used this website to get a really good close-up look of van Gogh's painting technique. I then challenged them to recreate van Gogh's "Starry Night." 

We finished off the day with piano practice and independent reading. Also my nephew was here and showed Conductor the neat electrical things his Papa gave him to try. This inspired Conductor to take out his electrical kit he had received for Christmas. He had brought it to me shortly after Christmas and told me he didn't want it as it was too hard. He's spent quite a bit of time today working on it and doing just fine. 

It's hard to see in this photo, but there is a red light lit up beside his hand. He was pretty proud of himself for getting this to work and I was very proud of him for persevering.