Welcome From Mama Bee

Thanks for dropping by The Hive!

We work to weave our homeschool days around our faith, our subtropical climate, and our coastal landscape.

Hopefully this will provide a small spot for our family and friends to follow along with our traveling, gardening, and homeschooling adventures!

Friday, December 12, 2008

Watercoloring

So, Dear Readers, I decided that it was high time to clear off the counter and dig out our watercolors! A friend of mine has a honeypot of an ebook that gives 52 watercolor activities that I can do with the worker bees (Pssst...her name is Kristie, and you can buzz over to see her stuff at www.earthschooling.com!).

Best of all, for a 'Watercolor Traumatized' mama bee like me, her projects are simple and non-intimidating!

Traumatized you ask?! Absolutely!

When the Worker Bees were 1, 2, and 3 years old, some crazy, over-achiever, homeschool guru convinced me to set up my baby bees with watercolor activities! Well...the baby bees had a blast doing everything except watercoloring! They ate the paper, chewed on the brushes, and dumped the water, but no painting!

Deep Breath!

The baby bees have grown up into nice, polite worker bees now, and have the greatest respect for our materials! I haven't had to pull a brush out of anyone's mouth in years!

Anyway, here is some of what we did yesterday! No Messes, No Tears, It was a Good Day!

In honor of Santa Lucia's day on Saturday, we worked with Kristie's Lucia Watercolor activity that is prepared 'hidden picture' style. Which means, that you follow the story and don't know exactly what the picture will be until you finish...great fun!

Here is my painting.


Horsie-Girl didn't ~exactly~ follow along with what I was doing, but she always takes the most care and has the lightest colors of all of us.


Much to my surprise, Knightly followed along with me; although, as usual his is the boldest, drippiest painting of all!


I thought that Sprocket's was the most interesting. He followed Horsie-Girl and put his red lines (candles) all around the outside of the ring, then he looked up and saw how I had done mine. He took his wet sponge and 'erased' his lines. By the time he was ready to repaint them, everyone had figured out what the picture was of (Lucia's Crown), and he painted them from the perspective of looking down on Lucia's head. Sprocket even commented that it looked like her head was underneath. Confirming my suspicion that Sprocket views the world from about a 45 degree different perspective than the rest of us! :D



After we finished with the Lucia Crowns, we set them to the side to dry and everyone painted whatever they wanted.

Knightly painted a Sphinx (maybe a subtle hint for me to get the Egypt Block prepped??)



Horsie-Girl painted a red dolphin with a school of fish. She took great care painting the water around the little fishies.



Sprocket painted two shades of blue on his paper, and then he 'lifted out' a polar bear. The picture here really doesn't do it justice, it really looks like a polar bear in real life! (Pssst...the polar bear's nose is the upper-left part of the white area in the middle!).



Gotta go run check the gingerbread cookies that in are the oven for our Lucia Celebration tomorrow! If I'm not too dazed and confused getting up at the crack of dawn...I'll take some pictures to post here! Horsie-Girls crown is a thing of beauty, and...um...Oh Dear! We need to get going with the Star Boy hats!

Buzzing off!

Mama Bee

2 comments:

Rachel said...

Your blog is my to do list. Thanks for all the pictures and details, now I'm off to get Kristi's ebook...

thegoodwitch said...

Aaah, that was so great to read. I can't manage watercolour worth a darn! I just wish someone was out there to teach us, the parents!! Nice to read your blog, Mama Bee.