2016 Recap in Photos

Looking back at 2016, I realise that our life has changed dramatically.

While looking through these photos, I could not help seeing that homeschooling was indeed a lifestyle choice.  There are many aspects of homeschooling life that I miss, such as the ability to control our time and to engage in many uniquely interesting activities.  Nonetheless, we are where we are at this moment in life, and I am grateful for the opportunities that we have been given to enable a smooth transition from homeschooling to 'normal' schooling.

Everything from September to December zoomed past in a blur for me, so it is important that I keep the memories of what life was like for us, so that I may look back and recognise that I actually miss a lot of what was so good about our homeschooling life (I certainly don't miss the difficult bits!).

January
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family, with friends
• Sports: table tennis, climbing, archery
• Classes: Chemistry lab, model aircraft, zoology, English, History
• Studying fossils

 

February
Highlights:

• Time: eating out, drawing, cooking
• Sports: Climbing 
• Classes: model aircraft design, mask theatre, robotics, chemistry lab
• Studying prehistory and human evolution
• Field trips: Brooklands Museum, Colchester Zoo, National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts

March
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family
• Classes: model aircraft, zoology, chemistry lab, programming
• Studying rocks and minerals
• Special event: jazz singing concert, short story writing submission

April
Highlights:

• Classes: model aircraft, zoology, chemistry lab, programming
• Studying rocks and minerals
• Field trips: House of Parliament, BBC Broadcasting House, London Aquarium
• Special event: singing concert, short story writing submission

May
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with friends, with family
• Sports: table tennis
• Classes: physics lab, forest school, model aircraft design
• Studying art
• Field trips: Hertford Castle, Chartwell
• Special event: Universtiy Challenge in Chemistry (First Prize)!

June
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family, reading
• Classes: physics lab, programming
• Studying art, ancient history, geography
• Field trips: quarry, geological excavation site
• Special event: jazz singing concert

July
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family, with friends
• Classes: physics lab, astronomy, model aircraft design
• Studying art, insects, circuits
• Special event: jazz singing concert, model aircraft competition (First Prize), percussion concert

August
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family, drawing
• Classes: physics lab, programming
• Field trips: Cheddar Gorge
• Special event: 'geek' gathering

September
Highlights:

• Started attending school.
• Resumed mountain biking.
• Attended another 'geek' gathering.

October
Highlights:

• No photos!
• I was completely overwhelmed by work, and was practically just trying to survive it so did not even think to take any photos.

November
Highlights:

• Time: eating out, reading
• Field trips: Science Museum, British Museum

December
Highlights:

• Time: with family, climbing
• There's an obvious theme in this year's Christmas presents....

There is a definite lack of photos now that we spend most of our week day times apart.  I am still not used to not being the main participant of Tiger's learning journey.  It is a bitter-sweet feeling for me to see Tiger diving into his new phase of life so readily and successfully, and I am certainly glad that he is so adaptable to changes.  While I always knew that my homeschooling journey would eventually end, I was a little surprised to have it come so quickly and so suddenly.

Everything happens for a reason.  I am just so grateful that we are all in a good place right now, having the experiences that we are meant to be having for this season of our lives.

Wishing everyone a very happy 2017.

A Brush With Colours

Recently we went to The Wallace Collection to take part in a Rubens-inspired, All Things Light and Beautiful: Colour and Painting Workshop.

The workshop started with a gallery session where the guide introduced the children to two of Rubens' paintings while discussing the artist's use of primary and secondary colours to depict light and darkness in the paintings.

The children were then asked to make a sketch of the Rubens paintings for ideas that they might want to use back in the art studio to create their own landscape paintings based on the principles they have learnt in the morning, of:

• primary and secondary colours;
• complementary colours; and
• warm and cool colours.

The afternoon session of the workshop started with the a discussion of how artists in the 17th century would have had to find ways to create the colours they wanted either by grinding up natural materials such as earth and beetles, or through mixing primary colours to create secondary colours.

The children then had a chance to apply what they have learnt to create their very own Rubens-inspired, colourful landscape masterpiece.

We came home and learnt a little bit more about Peter Paul Rubens by ourselves by looking at a few prints.

I then looked around and found that the Royal Academy of Arts is currently holding an exhibition  that showcases Rubens' works alongside those of other famous artists (such as van Dyck, Cezanne, Turner) whose works and styles were influenced by him.

So off we went to see the Rubens and His Legacy exhibition.

After going round the exhibition, we took part in a workshop where we first looked at how Rubens positioned his subjects in The Lion Hunt, then we were to use pastels to quickly sketch the positions in two minutes.  The exercise was to give us a taste of the thoughts that an artist would have gone into in the compositional phase.

Following that, we were given copies of contemporary photographs as well as Rubens' paintings to make our own collage.  We were given time to position the photographs on a black sheet of paper before using pastels to enhance our composition.  Once we were happy with our collages, we were to use charcoal to draw our compositions out.

Here are our results.  Tiger drew his composition based on his collage.

I was happy enough with my collage to stop there and then.

**Update on June 27th, 2016:
I was contacted by Artsy, a website that collates artists' bio, high quality pictures of of the artists' works, exclusive articles, and up-to-date exhibition listings around the world.  As this is a Rubens blog post, I am linking to the Rubens page where you can learn more about the artist. The page even includes related artist & category tags, plus suggested contemporary artists.  Well worth a visit!


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 3/10/15
2. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years Week 46
3. The Virtual Refrigerator
4. Collage Friday: Faces of American History
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the learner's permit!
6. My Week in Review #28

Manet: Still LIfe and Portraits

We did our usual study at home using postcards and printouts of a few of Manet's work as well as looking through the collection here.

Once again, we relied on documentaries to (1) tell us more about the man himself (caution: both clips contain artistic nudity):

and (2) understand one of his masterpieces a little bit better:

After watching the documentaries, we decided to set up a simple still life.  Tiger first did an observational sketch in pencil:

We melted broken crayon pieces that we have saved over the years in a muffin tin, and Tiger used a Q-tip to apply the melted crayons on his sketch.  He had to work fast as the crayons solidified very quickly.

After this step, Tiger switched to using tempera paint to complete the background of his work:

Here is Tiger's masterpiece:

I often tag along in Tiger's activities, especially in art, so I did a sketch using ballpoint pen then painted it in watercolour.  Still life is more difficult than I had imagined.

Then we went to see the Manet exhibition and attended a portraiture workshop at the Royal Academy of Arts.

After going around the exhibition looking at Manet's masterly brush strokes, we headed to the workshop room to participate in a preliminary exercise to help us loosen up and to understand how brush strokes work.  We were each given three brushes of varying sizes and a black-and-white copy of Manet's work.

We were to use only black acrylic paint to copy the still life photo in 5 minutes.   No prelimiary sketches; paint directly with the brushes.  It was hard!

Tiger's version

My version

Next we repeated the exercise using black and white acrylic paint.  Again in 5 minutes.

Tiger's version

My version

Finally, we were given 8 minutes to paint a portrait of someone famous, using black, white and blue paint.  We were given photos of five famous people to choose from.  Tiger chose pirates:

Here is his interpretation of the man on the left in the photo above:

I chose a local politician's glamourous wife.  I was just building up my painting to a recognisable stage when the 8 minutes were up.  Oh well.

This post is linked up to:
1) All Year Round Blog Carnival: Winter 
2) Hearts for Home Blog Hop #5
3) Homeschool Mother's Journal: February 22, 2013
4) Hobbies and Handicrafts - Feb 22
5) Collage Friday - Family, History, and More
6) TGIF Linky Party #64
7) It's a Wrap
8) Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with the Busy Break Week
9) Share it Saturday - Feb 23
10) The Sunday Showcase - 2/23/13
11) Hip Homeschool Hop - 2/26/13
12) Virtual Refrigerator