September Grandview Program and Art Co-op

Our weekly art classes ended last November.  Then we did a few art co-ops at my church for April and May.  There were several people that wanted to participate in an art co-op, but figuring out a day and time plus a location proved to be a bit of a challenge.  So, I decided to kill two birds with one stone so to speak.  We were already going to Grandview for our once a month hands on science program, so we were able to organize it so we could have our Grandview program in the morning, bring a sack lunch, and have our art class in the Grandview classroom after lunch.

Today was our first program for the new school year.  Each of our programs has had a short program, a hands on activity, and a lapbook to take home and complete.  We are continuing on with our animal classification series.  Last year we did mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and insects.  Today we learned about birds.  We had 48 children attend this mornings program!

Our hands on activity was to paint a gourd bird house and I have to tell you there was some very creative painters out there today!

After we painted our bird houses, it was time for lunch.

The we moved on to the art portion of today's co-op.  My plan is to cover a different artist each month.  We will learn a bit about the artist, make a notebooking page about the artist, and then try to recreate one of their works or make a piece of art work using their technique.  I am trying to use a variety of different media with the children so they will do something different every time.  Since the Grandview program was on birds today, the artist I chose was John James Audubon.  We learned some fun and fascinating facts about him, made a notebooking page, and then did a drawing of any bird/birds the children chose and painted the drawings using water color paints.  We had 29 children stay for art ranging in age from 2-14.  They did a great job with their artwork!

I will have to update with pictures of the lapbook at a later date.  We had a great day at Grandview!  Next month we will be doing Fish and our artist will be Georges Seurat.