More Thinking Out of the Box for Schooling

Yesterday was our day of art in school. The afternoon classes at the cooperative consisted of Drama (practicing for Aladdin), Choir, and Art History. In the morning before cooperative I set up a (what I hope) interesting morning of art that also kind of trickled into today. Here is some of the things we did:

Read and studied two poems from The Art of Poetry. This is a TOS Review Crew item we are reviewing and the review post will be up in March. We did read a chapter in our read aloud from A Peep Behind the Scenes. We keep hoping this one will stop being such a depressing book, but so far the hits just keep coming. Devotions were also taken care of through the Who Am I series from Apologia. Once we finished these three items we jumped into our art stuff.

Grace did some reading and drawing from her two books Artistic Pursuits (another TOS Review Crew product) and Keys to Drawing. The Keys to Drawing had her draw something mechanical and only concentrate two areas of the object to draw intricately then just contour for the remainder of the shape. Artistic Pursuits has us working on texture which is tough for Grace. I keep challenging her more and more with her drawing to help stretch her talent.

We read about two artists from the I Want to Be An Artist e-book. The first was a sketch artist that worked or a newspaper by day and illustrated children's books by night and weekend. The other artist was a graphic designer. I decided to take the graphic designer aspect and kind of run with it. So I found a mini unit study online about graphic arts design. We discussed what a graphic artist is and what kind of mediums they would work in. Today we took that a step further and did two activities from the unit study that can be found here at Easy Fun School.

1. "Look at some food products in a store. What's printed on the packaging? What color is most dominant on the packaging? Sharpen your graphic designer's eye? What color or typefaces are pleasing"?
2. "Visit your local grocery store or other marketplace and make a list of five product designs that you like and five that you don't like. What do you or don't you like about them"?

Tomorrow will we work on the next step which is creating our own package for a real product based on what we learned from the packaging we saw today in the store.

We also visited the big library today and found some books about lettering, calligraphy, and drawing manga digitally. I also put many books on hold about graphic art that I hope to put to good use during this unit study. Of course the minute we go home Grace retreated to her room to try out the new Drawing Manga Digitally book. 

Yesterday we also discussed starting back with her mini business of making note cards and bookmarks to sell at art festivals. We searched around on Amazon and found what she needed to make this happen and it should all arrive tomorrow. Below you will see what we ordered:

I hope to start a series of posts in the next few days about Teaching School Outside of the Box. Some of the topics I will be covering are: health, fitness, current events, history, science, life skills, art, project based learning, cooperatives, service and volunteering, and Bible and devotions. I by no means think I am an expert, but I do find that as years go by Grace learns and I teach out of the normal realm of what most people would view as education. Each child is different and each child needs a different path. This just happens to be our path.