as the song goes ...

"Take a picture of something you see ..."

That was the title of our summer holiday project. The idea was for us each to take a photo a week over the five/six week holiday and then use Coral Paint Shop Pro X to alter the pictures to produce our own individual pieces of art. This seems to have taken a long time to do (and still isn't finished) for these reasons:-

1) The kids needed encouragement to do this on a weekly basis! We each chose a theme for our photos - K horses (!), B buildings, me trees.

2) I needed to work out how to use Paint Shop Pro before I could get the kids to play around with their photos!

3) I never found enough time to do number 2) above!

4) I wanted to do a simple merge of all the five/six photos to produce one collage masterpiece - I still haven't worked out how to do this without tearing all my hair out!

5) However, we've done this so far, using just one of the photos and playing around with it using Paint Shop Pro to alter the image amazingly.

6) I think the photos they've produced are marvellous - now, on to the next stage, collage (I'll report back in another month or so!).

K's start picture - toy stable door ...


... became these two wonderful abstracts


B's start picture - bricks and plaster ...


... became this mosaic style star

Just a snippet of some of the other work this week ...

We're continuing with our "Around the world ..." lapbook - this is so much fun! Have looked briefly at Greece this week. Most of the time the kids were demonstrating their rather strange version of Greek dancing to the music on this website. They also drew their own Evzones complete with fluffy black balls on the shoes and read about the Acropolis and the different styles of architecture. Used this site to write our names in Greek, we also learnt how to say "good morning" correctly. We read four Greek Myths using this website, drew the characters and wrote details of the meanings of each myth. Finally we read the booklet "I wonder why Greeks built temples" which has interesting snippets of relevant information.

Came across this site on Merry's blog and B really enjoyed making up some lovely mosaics.

B asked what syllables were, so we covered that and they both picked up the idea quickly. By checking out the Enchanted Learning website, I discovered that Haiku is made up of expressive lines of writing containing a certain number of syllables in each line. Perfect. We had a laugh a few weeks ago by making up a rather rude poem which we thought could be Haiku (see previous posts) but this was the perfect opportunity to actually produce a correct Haiku! We chose a theme of atrocious weather as we'd experienced torrential rain, lighting and thunder on Tuesday morning. Enchanted Learning explains how to write a Haiku - check it out here. Here's the Haiku's produced by K and B:-

The day is rainy
Mist falling down from the sky
Calming sound of rain
(K)

A wet, rainy day
The lightning flashing about
Sounds calm and restful
(B)

B has been playing with Lego all week and is producing some wonderful things. He's either building them freehand or follows the instructions on his own.

Geomag has reappeared too which kept B busy for a while one morning while K was battling away with some maths! K has been producing little goody bags for people in her model horse club containing literature, star charts and Hama bead goodies. Bought some Flome and had a play with that, although I don't think it'll be something that they reach for on a regular basis. Did find a website with a recipe to make our own which we may try at some point. Ks been using the "Paint" application on the PC to draw little horses.

Finally, Friday we ran a group session all about horses in history which we feel was successful. K helped pull all this together. I couldn't believe how much history involved horses in one way or another. This site was very useful in getting information that I needed. We did lots of arts and crafts and then the kids enjoyed another run around outside thanks to the lovely Autumn sunshine that we seem to be experiencing a lot of this year.