New York Snow

Today, up in Hudson Heights, my “Let’s look in our favorite book!” class had our second in-home lesson. In honor of the snow we read The Mitten, by Jan Brett. (My favorite winter time children’s book.) And then Painted the snow. I brought brown and red paper so that our white and blue tempera paint would have contrast. Even though brown is more of a ground-like color everybody choose red. I am happy to give the children choices when it comes to their projects. Because I already pick the material and give a general topic, it is important that they also have the opportunity to make artistic choices.

After painting snow for a while we looked at Eloise, by Kay Thompson. We didn’t read the whole story, but we did look at her messy room. And then we made our own messy rooms. For the younger boys I included squiggles and curly curves to show how my shoes flew when I kicked them off my feet, and my coat soared through the air when I shucked it off. I wanted to emphasize that this did not have to be a representational drawing. For the older girls I drew a bed and some boots. After we drew these with oil pastels it was important that we talk about how drawing with oil pastels was different from chalk, crayons, and colored pencils. We decided that they were very soft and very oily. Last, we used watercolor to finish up our awesome, messy bedrooms.