An Arty Kind Of Day.....

Well last week we had such a good week of school, this week we are off to a bit of a rougher start. First The Olympics, so good, it is keeping us up really late. Dh and I are staying up, the kids go to bed on time. Then we have my wonderful oldest child. His first couple of days were rough. I mentioned in a recent entry that he gives struggles in his writing. Monday and Tuesday were bad for this, so it through us behind a little bit. That is an advantage for homeschooling though, the schedule can be adjusted easy. Wednesday was spent playing a little bit of catch up. Our funnest part of the day was the Art Class. The boys focused on Chinese art. Since China invented printing, I thought it would be fun to make some prints of different characters in Chinese. My friend Li Mei lent us this book. Which is really cool and explains different chinese characters. I picked out a couple of them and made some tiles for the kids to make prints with. I used old meat trays (clean ones of course) to make the templates.

Time to choose the one we want to use. Tough Choice! LOL! It was a very simple technique. The boys painted the one side and pressed it down.
It made some really cool results. This is actually the one that Sam made.

This is Gabe's. He was having more fun making the colors blend with the roller.

As you can see he was very happy to be painting. The bottom one he did when he learned about folding the paper in half.
Once they had started painting they did not want to stop. Look at all the beautiful results.

I did want to make a quick note that if any one is reading this that reads Chinese, I am sorry if I made a mistake on one of my characters that I made. I know that one slight line difference can change the whole meaning of the word. I just hope that it did not become an offensive word. Sorry if it did. :)