Hello Again - glad to be back!

 

It has been a very long time since I last posted. What started off as a short break for holidays with the intention of posting a few holiday pics has turned into a three month hiatus. There are so many reasons, family sickness, an injured cat, other projects taking priority. All things which have led me to wonder how much time I can spend on blogging at this point in my life. 

After a lot of reflection though I realised I miss sifting through our everyday to find things to share here. So I'm going to begin again with no promises to do much more than share a few a photo or two for now. And aren't these just lovely ones. 

Good times in the forest, amazing light and mighty tree stumps that lead me to want to share this poem I discovered recently as part of ModPo a brilliant mooc I'm following at the moment. It's by John Ashbury and it's called Some Trees. Here it is:

"Some Trees"

by John Ashbery

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

 

 

Holidays

It's holiday time here and we're enjoying family, river bathing, sunshine and barbecues down in St Etienne. We're going to be away or entertaining guests on and off from now until September so I'll be taking a rest from the homeschooling files and mainly posting photos of our adventures for the next few weeks. But first here are some pictures of a quilt I made for Maya's birthday back in April that I've been meaning to share for ages.

The quilt is made of strips of fabric alternating patterned strips and plain strips. The plain strips are white with small blue dots and the patterned strips are made up of squares sewn together. Making the patterned strips was a lot of fun, I had a colour scheme of pinks and purples and a hint of blue in mind and had bought some fabrics specially a few years ago and used other fabrics from my stash. Quite a few our from this lovely shop in Paris. There's also an African fabric in there with beautiful zebras and a few organic cottons ordered online.

The quilt is backed with half of an old duvet cover from Ikea. Originally it was cream but that's not the most hard wearing colour and so a few years ago I dyed it pink. The nice thing about using old sheets, pillow cases and duvet covers is that they're really nice and soft from all that washing, perfect for snuggling up under. Maya loves her quilt and put it straight on her bed, what more can a sewing mama want?

Homeschool Files : Art and Artists - Matisse

Snails

As you may have gathered from many of my posts, we spend a lot of time crafting and drawing. This probably began because it's something I enjoy doing and the kids do too. It's also because I believe it's really important for people to have different ways of expressing themselves and art is one valuable form alongside, dance, music, talking about our feelings, writing and many others.

Recently we have been working on Matisse. It began when we decided to spend some time drawing bodies using our wooden artist's doll. After we'd done sketching over several days and sessions, I wanted to offer the children another way of representing bodies and I immediately thought of Matisse. Both his paintings and his later collages represent bodies beautifully in ways that reveal their underlying shapes and fill them with movement.

We began by looking at some Matisse pictures online. We talked a bit about the pictures and I shared a bit with the kids about Matisse particularly how he turned to collage when he got older and he couldn't paint anymore because of rheumatism. This led to a discussion about frustration and how you can deal with it before we got stuck into collaging.

Dancing man

I placed all our collage materials in the middle of the table. These include old magazines, newspaper, wrapping paper, speciality papers such as origami, tissue paper etc and painted paper, snippets of paper the children have stamped on, kraft paper etc. Basically anything that I think could possibly be interesting goes in the box (ok boxes now- shh). I also put out a pair of scissor each and a couple of glue sticks, everyone having their own tools makes for much less squabbling in our house.

I put the artist's doll back in the middle of the table and let one of the kids arrange his body the way they wanted. Maya decided to begin with a cat rather than a person, I worked on a man mirroring the artist doll's position. The youngest two decided they would just use the papers to do a collage and spent a lot of time with the magazines cutting out anything that interested them.

Man and his cat

For me the important thing about this sort of activity is that we're doing it together and that it is a proposition that the children can take up and run with as they wish. Quite often I find myself alone or just with one child at the beginning, but the fact that mum's doing it often means that by the time I've finished everyone has joined in and carries on long after I've moved on to getting the tea or running the hoover around. 

Pink Flamingo

I was really pleased with how my artwork turned out and the children's too. It's been a really fun project and one we're continuing with as you can see from the photos, using it to explore our experiences at Branféré Animal park. For the younger children collaging is a great activity for their fine motor skills and the littlest one also had fun hunting through magazines for specific colours or objects we named.

Giraffe

If you want to do this kind of art activity at home you'll need:

• collage materials 
• glue sticks
• A4 or bigger sheets of paper
• scissors

Remember anything can be collage material, you could even do the same as Matisse and make your own materials first by painting paper. You could also work on another artist. Copying great artists has always been a part of artistic training and is a great way to think about how art represents the world and to learn knew skill sets.
 

The homeschool files : Passionate about Ponies

As I've said before, one of the principles of our approach is following the children's interests. Home educated children have a lot of time to explore their passions if we let them. Both at home and out in the world, all the time they are not spending in school can be used to pursue their interests. In the case of our oldest Maya this means a lot of time is spent on horses and horse riding. 

Watching Maya's passion grow has been a joy. From her first tentative steps at age 4, she has grown to be very disciplined about this activity. She's also so enthusiastic it sometimes verges on being annoying, like when she asks you for the fiftieth time in how many minutes you'll be leaving for pony club! This is really her world, as none of the rest of us have any experience with our equine friends. Of course we've all learnt a lot from reading books and watching films and documentaries about horses but she is still our resident expert.

When your homeschool child finds something they love and pursues it outside of the home, as for parents who send their kids to school, it can sometimes be complicated to know how involved you should be. Maya's pony club is her world and as she's grown up a lot this last year she's needed us in it less and less. And although it's delighted us to see her have the confidence and responsibility to do this all by herself (well except for lifts - agh), it was sometimes hard not to know much about what was going on. 

So, it was with great curiosity and delight that we attended her club's annual party and barbecue last weekend and were admitted, if only for a day into her world. The opportunity to meet and speak with her teachers was great and we were happy to hear that she's a useful and much appreciated member of their community as well as a good rider. We were also able to put names to the faces of all her friends who share her passion for riding. 

As our children get older I expect we will be less and less involved with their learning process, but I hope and believe they'll always be these windows into their lives which let us share with them the progress they're making and the joy their finding in pursuing their passions.