Lesson 4: Colour Chart

This was a truly valuable experience.

The object of this lesson was to experiment with coloured pencils to see how a combination of colours can create new colours.

As we are using the text (Barry Stebbing’s Feed My Sheep) as a reference rather than a workbook, it required drawing a lot of little circles first.  Very tiresome business, that.  It was also impractical for my class of little people in the park, so I created a pdf which you can download and print out, experimenting with colour mixing, including suggestions of colour combining to try. {It will open in a new window, and if you click it there, it will download.  I have no idea why it opens in a new window. =) }

For this activity, if it is at all in your power, purchase for your children a large set of colour pencils.  Twelve pencils is a desperate kind of torture to a child who loves to use colour.  Thirty-six is better, but a set of fifty Crayola will set you back about $20 and bring hours of unmitigated joy.

Label the colours as you create them if you choose to complete the activity in your sketch pad, and this will be a valuable reference for future drawing use.  I have seen a new and adventurous attitude to colour among my own children after completing this exercise.  It will empower your little people to be daring with colour!

 

Lesson 3: Secondary Colours

I loved this lesson!  This was a challenging lesson for the children (and some of the grown ups ) but the sense of achievement was pure delight!

The first task was to apply the theory of secondary colours to three drawings.  Each had to be coloured using only primary colours, to produce secondary colours as the final result.  While most children despaired at first, after holding their work at a little distance they were able to see how they had achieved mixing colours with pencil.

The second task elicited groans of despair and disbelief that I would require such of them.   It was to copy a picture of two ducks, and to then use primary colours to create a colourful picture.  The result should include primary and secondary colours.

It was a lesson for me in communication, as one dear student misunderstood the instructions and coloured her ducks green.  When I (as nicely as I could) enquired why she had given her ducks cholera, she explained that if she could only use green, purple and orange…

Miss 7 was very proud of her results, and attempted this task several more times after this first effort. (You can see this was done before we had the talk about using a ruler to make your borders!)

There really was a lot of opposition to this task from both art groups, but everyone was so pleasantly surprised at how well they did, and  there were many ducks drawn in the students free time to attest that a challenge is often a good thing

This lesson was great for teaching secondary colours, and for stretching the students in their perception of their abilities.

 

Creation Science Competition: Astronomy

Each year the Creation Science Education Association hold competitions reflecting the National Science Theme, from a Creation perspective.

The Irish Chicklette wrote an acrostic, Miss 10 made a telescope, and Miss 7 wrote an illustrated book.  Each entry had to reflect a teaching from the Bible, be explicit about God as Creator, and show man’s awareness of the heavens.  I’d like to share Miss 7’s entry with you

The End.

My favourite part?

The high-rise buildings in Bethlehem  

 

The Turkeys Arrive!

Hello everyone!

You’d never guess……I’ve seen (and held) brand new turkey babies!!!  You just can’t imagine how some of the most ungainly looking birds can produce such adorabilly chickies like these.

I have been waiting and waiting with a degree of anxiety for these babies.  The farmer told us a few weeks ago that they were coming, and apart from my general interest in all things birds, and my particular interest in baby anything, and my especial desire to see baby turkeys (it’s a first for me), my camera is due to go interstate for servicing after it’s rough treatment at the beach recently.  It will be away for perhaps six weeks, and I so didn’t want to miss the turkey babies..and here they are!

Aren’t they darling?  I honestly thought they would be, at the very least, bald or gangly: but they are the softest, sweetest, and not a tiny bit scared of you, little treasures.

We all were allowed to hold one, and they were perfectly content to sit.  They will spend the next three weeks in the farmer’s kitchen under a warm light, as turkey mothers are not the most efficient at raising their babies.

After keeping the farmers from their work while we each had a turn of adoring the chicks, we then went to see some lambs that were born last night, and check how much the others had grown.

With the light fast fading, we visited “Miss Piggy”, who has this week had piglets.   She was keeping her babies close by her, inside her shed, but her contemporary (whose name I don’t know – perhaps a more moral “Mrs Piggy”?) was feeding her collection of youngsters.

It is a very fine thing to have farming friends who are willing to share with you!

 

City Meets Country

I am not cut out to be a farmer; no, no, no (just one, back breaking, limb torturing, skin prickling, day of hay baling made that clear!).  But I do love taking my children each week to spend a day in the country.  It has been a  marvelous source of joy and learning for them as we have visited  a local dairy farm.

‘Our’ farmer is not just a dairy farmer: he has chickens, geese, turkeys, sheep, pigs, and of course…..lots of cows!  So he is what I think of as a picture book farmer.

The farm is run by a father and son.  They have been very generous (and tolerant!) about sharing farming life with us, and have allowed the girls to observe, and even participate in, some of the farming activities.  We have all stood in the way and marveled during milking, and the braver among us have tried our hands at it; we have seen new born baby lambs (twins!), new piglets, and just this week, some dear goslings.

I also saw my first ever cock fight: the photos didn’t go so well, but you maybe can see why I couldn’t get the song “Kung Fu Fighting” out of my head for some time afterward…  It was spectacular to watch!

On one visit, we were helping feed the cows before milking.  The farmer had promised to show us the creek, but had more work to do first with the cows.  As we were walking out of the feeding shed, he called back that if my girls stayed to help in the next part of the task, he would be finished sooner, and we could all be off to the creek.

My children ran back inside to help, but I stood there in a moment of indecision.  I was holding the baby of the family, and paused to wonder if I should go back and supervise because after all, the farmer perhaps would think the girls more capable than they are (they each look older than their age) and would he be aware of how un-savvy they are about cows?

My pondering was pulled up short when I glanced up and saw a wall of cows descending upon me. The farmer said as casual as you please, as though I was not about to be trampled to death by the closet things to elephants in Australia, that I had better be moving.  Just like that.  “You’d better be moving, because they’re coming”.  The man is the personification of understatement.

To fully appreciate my dilemma, I should explain that it had been bucketing rain for a week.  The farmer has a LOT of cows.  The shed had a dirt floor with a LOT of…well, a lot of cow poo.  Juggling an almost two year is tricky on the best of days.  But to be wearing a pair of little pink thongs and a skirt, and juggling a chubby toddler while you slip and slide through the results of hundreds of cow’s after dinner actions, and there is an electric fence on one side of the narrow space you are attempting to traverse…..and there is a multitudinous assortment of enormous beasts heading straight at you……friends, it will injure my dignity if you try to imagine the scene. It was definitely a farming moment I won’t forget.

Miss 10 found out that baby cows, like baby most things, will chew on anything that comes handy…

Truly, it has been a most richly rewarding time for our family to share a little of  the daily life on a farm .  If you don’t have a farm close by, you could perhaps register with  farm day, an organization who match up families from the city, with a country family for a day.  Or you may like to try a farm stay for your next holiday.

A perfect way to end a perfect day……