Matisse Artist Study & Cross-Curricular Tie-In's

The boys have been studying about French artist, Henri Matisse.

Here are some photos of their Matisse-inspired art work:

Source: amazon.com via Colleen on Pinterest

We used several resources for this artist study:

Matisse Art Activity Pack 
This lovely pack by Mila Boutan provides templates, papers, and a nice, simple overview of Matisse and his work.
We have several of Mila Boutan's Artist Activity Packs and find them to work very well within the scope of homeschooling.

Kinder Art has a nice Matisse lesson plan pack.
It includes three lessons from Eileen Urbanski at the Avon Village School.
Thanks Eileen! We really enjoyed doing the lessons you created!
Similar to what Ms. Eileen did with her students, we read some biographies about Henri Matisse.

We explored his use of positive and negative space, and his use of color.

We did an extension activity to highlight the notion of positive and negative space by using our Montessori inspired land form cards.

We went out and did a shape, color, and pattern walk at the park and talked about what Matisse may have seen while he went out and explored his surroundings.

We looked at and created Fauvres. We also created art similar to his later style of using simple organic shapes by cutting them and adding them to show movement and form. 
However, instead of using white paper and painting it to get the perfect color we wanted, we used foam pieces that were pre-glued on the back sides.

The reason for this is that I wanted the boys to focus on cutting the shapes and using them to show movement and form as one lesson. We will do more with color mixing on white paper next week. Just wanted to start with the forms and the concepts of showing movement first.

Confessions of a Homeschooler has an excellent, free lesson pack called the World's Greatest Artists Unit Study. Thanks so much to Erica, as her lessons are wonderful and they tie in with the series of art books that we own by Mike Venezia. Worked out so well!
We have started to prep the Matisse section for a lapbook that we plan to complete throughout the year about the World's Greatest Artists. Was fun to work on the first artist for our lapbook. 

We even added in some technology with this artist study: an interactive study on Henri Matisse called Matisse for Kids! This interactive website is part of the Baltimore Museum of Art's Cone Kids Program. Gives a nice overview of Matisse's art. Also allows children to create their own Matisse inspired art at the end of the program.The boys just loved this!!!

Incredible @rt Department - incredibleart.org has an excellent collection of art lessons on Henri Matisse.
Love that these lessons focus on Essential Questions and have so much variety and depth to them! Cannot wait to do some of these wonderful lessons next week with the boys as we continue our study of Matisse.

In addition to making Matisse inspired art, we have done a variety of integrated, cross-curricular activities:

Geography: Study of Land Forms and France
Math: Study of Patterns, Open and Closed Figures, and Positive and Negative Numbers
Sensorial: Positive and Negative Space, Color Tablets (complimentary colors)
P.E.: Movement
Science: Patterns, Shapes, and Colors in Nature.
Language Arts: Reappearing Themes, Feelings (how the notions of feeling happy and relaxed come through on paper, both in print and in pictures / art).

I have created a Matisse Board on Pinterest in case any of you would like to see more about our Matisse Study. Will add links to the cross-curricular activities, along with whatever we do related to Matisse next week to this board as well.

Has been super fun and interesting to learn about Henri Matisse!

Have you studied Henri Matisse? If you have, please be sure to leave a link to your blog or website in the comments section of this post so that others can see your neat ideas and so that I can pin your ideas to the Matisse Board on Pinterest.

On a side note, if you have not checked out our family's DIY Crash Me Please! entry, please do! 

Here is a link to our entry. We are hoping to win to have our yard made over into an outdoor classroom and play area. Please leave a comment about our entry, especially if you love outdoor learning too...

This post is linked up with Sunday Showcase hosted by Bern from Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas and Aimee from Classified Mom. Aimee informed me that I will be featured this Sunday for the Sunday Showcase. Thanks to both Aimee and to Bern for their lovely blogs and for this neat blog linky party each week! Always look forward to seeing and reading what everyone links, as there are always fabulous ideas on Sunday Showcase!

On Our Shelves: December Activities

We have been busy here, cheerfully decorating and putting out materials for the Christmas season.
So far, we have put up our tree and have started to decorate it...

We also have put some Christmas themed works on our shelves in our homeschool room, and have laid out our two town scenes...the little Town of Bethlehem and our Old Fashioned Christmas Town.

Here are some photos of some of what we have been up to so far for the holidays...

Estimation, counting, sorting, patterning, more and less work for math using chocolates. Both boys loved doing a variety of math work using these chocolate filled containers...

Little Bro attempting to estimate how long he is "in jingle bells"...he was trying to show how big he is by comparing the length of the jungle bell strand with his length...he eventually realized that it would be helpful to lay down next to the jingle bells, instead of having the jingle bells on top of him. He had a great time using the jingle bells.

Little Bro working with a strand of jingle bells. He counted the number of bells attached to the strand and then, used the beads and the wooden numbers to show the total (21). He then measured the length of the jingle bell strand. He loved doing both of these math works...when he wrapped up the math, he then had a blast playing with the strand of jingle bells.
For more cool jingle bell ideas, please be sure to pop over and read Jackie's post at Ready, Set, Read! about Jingle Bells and then, check out the jungle bell shakers that she made and then, pop on over to see Little Wonder's Days neat post about Jingle Bells creations. Little Bro will wanna make some shakers for sure when he sees how nice they look on these two blogs!!!

Big Bro doing gift wrap work. This is actually such a nice work extension, as he had to measure the boxes to determine which pre-cut piece of paper would best match the size of the box (for control of error, only one piece of paper fit per box).He then had to wrap the boxes, tape them closed, and then, had work at stacking the boxes.

As an added challenge to this work, he had to tie a bow that was attached to an elastic band and then, had to figure a way to carefully stack the boxes so that they would all fit together only using one bow. This was very challenging for him but he loved doing this work. 12/15 Update to this post: Big Bro's friend from Raccoon School tried this work and loved it too.

Big Bro and Little Bro both enjoyed doing this Hershey's Kisses Addition Book. How fun to get to use chocolate candy kisses as they did their math work. Big Bro did the more complex addition problems near the end of the book. Big Bro also helped at showing Little Bro how to do the various addition problems throughout the book. Both boys enjoy doing math and eating chocolate, so this was a fun math activity...seemed to fit in nicely, as we had lots of chocolate on hand for our cookie baking and gingerbread house decorating...we also got to watch a biography about Milton S. Hershey and how the candy got its name, as Big Bro has been learning and reading biographies. Did you know how the kisses got their name? According to both this book and the biography we watched about Milton S. Hershey, the machine that these candies were manufactured on made a sound that sounded like "smooch" , "smooch", "smooch", so Milton Hershey thought of the name kisses. Here is a link to all things Hershey for you...yummy!!!

Little Bro doing pouring work, using a Christmas themed pitcher.

Big Bro doing World Stamps sorting work. As an extension, this time, he needs to find a stamp that corresponds to whatever countries we have studied up to that point as part of our Around the World in December activities. He has a good time checking out all of the different stamps.

Little Bro doing some hammering, pretending to be one of Santa's elves.

Counting work for Little Bro using bows and a number line.

Part of our Little Town of Bethlehem scene.

A photo of our Old Fashioned Christmas Town scene...

Knit finger puppets for the holidays. Both boys like to act out the stories we read together using these finger puppets. They also like to write and put on their own shows...

Both boys have also had fun over the weekend using our sensory table we have on our lanai, although the are hoping that the temps warm up, as it has been a little on the chilly side for us here in the Sunshine State the last few days. A huge thanks to Mari-Ann from Counting Coconuts, as she always has awesome ideas for sensory bins.  She is the real inspiration for me to have ever even tried to include sensory bins in our day-to-day, as when I was reading her blog one day, the boys saw the cool sensory bins she had for that month and asked if we could please have something like that for their work. Since Big Bro and Little Bro are a bit older than her son, in addition to our table being a themed sensory area, we are also using our table as a fun way to practice spelling. So, for this month, Big Bro has to sort through the sensory table and find the black and white tile letters to spell Christmas themed words from a word list. Little Bro has to find the beginning sounds for various words.

Little Bro selected this ornament as his special ornament for this year. He got to select it at the store and got to place it on the tree. Before Christmas comes, Dear Hubby and I will relocate his ornament, along with a funny glass pickle ornament and the boys will have to find their special ornament, along with the glass pickle, on Christmas Eve for a special Christmas Eve present. This is a little twist on the German tradition of the Christmas Pickle ornament hunt. Dear Hubby's family had a Christmas pickle on their tree, so part of our new tradition is from Dear Hubby's family tradition...

Big Bro selected this ornament as his special ornament for this year. He will look for this ornament and the Christmas pickle ornament on Christmas Eve.

Little Bro has been enjoying his new Little People Nativity set. In addition to these figures, the set features the Three Kings / Three Wise Men, the animals, and a shepherd. I made three part cards for him to use with this set. Will take some photos of Little Bro using these cards and doing this work sometime this week.

Transfer work for Little Bro. He selects the items to transfer, along with the plate and the tweezers he wishes to use for his work...

We have also been doing some of the neat Christmas Around the World activities suggested in the  
Expedition Earth materials made by Erica at Confessions of a Homeschooler.
If you have not seen Erica's awesome Expedition Earth material, please be sure to take a look.
I ordered it as a pdf and have been very happy with it.
Big Bro and Little Bro are enjoying doing the various activities that she suggests as part of Christmas Around the World.  She suggests using Children Like Me and Christmas Around the World, so we are doing just that.

This is a neat collection of Advent stories. We are reading one per night.

Well, that is what we are up to here in the Sunshine State.
Hope that all of you are enjoying your days in December.

Here is a link to My Montessori Journey's post about her December classroom activities. There are many neat ones that you may want to try in your classroom or homeschool.


Please be sure to visit Deb over at Living Montessori Now to see her post about turning Christmas crafts into Montessori activities.

In her post, Deb gives links to cool Advent and Christmas craft inspirations from some other neat blogs...so a big shout out not only to Deb at Living Montessori Now, but also, to all of these other crafty ladies who have shared some neat holiday themed fun on their respective blogs:


let's go fly a kite

Oopsey Daisy

Blissfully Domestic

A Little Learning for Two

Play and Learn with Dana

Playful Craft Creations


My post is linked up with the Montessori Monday posts at One Hook Wonder. Please be sure to pop over to One Hook Wonder to check out her nice Montessori inspired blog post, along with a great giveaway she is doing for Advent.

It is a cool wooden spiral Advent ring...here is what she is giving away:
"the spiral ring, 1 brass candle holder for the last spot, and 23 pegs on which you can glue stars, hearts, or whatever you desire"...