Picturing America through Fresco Art

Our Homeschool Coop (Master's Learning Coop) was awarded the "Picturing America" Artwork and Curriculum a couple of years ago from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

We finally got around to incorporating it into our schedule and I'm the lucky one who gets to teach it!  I am actually thrilled!  I love this!

This award includes 20 laminated, poster-sized 2-sided prints of American Historical Artwork and a book of lesson plans for each piece of artwork.

I started the first week using the curriculum and after blank stares from my students and their inability to answer key questions at the end, I decided it was time to start teaching this class with a little Stacy-Flare.

Enter Al Fresco Art!

The week's artwork was the Mission Nuestro Senora de la Concepcion  in San Antonio, Texas (the architecture itself, not necessarily the painting of the structure).

The Mission Concepcion was originally covered in white plaster and decoratively painted with Spanish Baroque patterns.  This got me to thinking that just maybe we could do a little painting on plaster ourselves to get a little feel for how the original artist created this "Mission Masterpiece."

I immediately started googling to see if this had been done before (why re-invent the wheel?) and sure enough, a fun little art project called "Fresco" which in essence means "mural-type paintings on plaster."  Of course, the most famous Frescoes have been done by Michelangelo.

Thanks to a fabulous tutorial video from Dick Blick, I was able to scale down this undertaking from a large wall to a piece of take-home art.  With a few tweaks, a hands-on lesson to learn more about the Mission Concepcion was born.



For full instructions, I highly recommend the video mentioned above. Here are my modifications for our specific project:
1. I used fabric I had on hand versus burlap
2. I added a rope "hanger" at the time of pouring the plaster so the artwork could hang on the wall.



3. I found geometric designs by searching for "stained glass geometric."
4. To transfer the design onto the plaster, I traced the design with charcoal, flipped it over and transferred the charcoal onto the plaster by tracing/rubbing the back.
5. I had the students only use Red, Yellow, Blue or any combination of these colors only (the colors used on the Mission Concepcion).

I love how each person brings their own personality into their art:



And there you have it! Not only did I personally learn about an important piece of American History (Mission Concepcion), but I also learned a new art technique AND a groovy new word that I like to throw around--FRESCO!

Homeschool Reward System

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love a good chart! More than a good chart, I adore MAKING charts in Excel.

I was reminiscing with a friend the other day about how 10 years ago, I helped create an Excel document to track our million dollar budget at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of Iowa (you just have to say that part). I still can't believe that only 10 years ago the budget was still being done by hand and not electronically. Crazy? Well I thought so, and made it my goal to get that thing automated. Thanks to a newbie geek in the office, he paid attention to my annoying requests for just the right formulas and formatting until it was PERFECT.

Looking back, I can see just how much more could be done and boy I sure hope they have some kind of special program by now! Anyway, it reminded me just how long this love for charts in Excel has been going on. I'll spare you the 5th grade story of going public with my computer skills and my experience as a 9 year old cataloging my dolls on index cards (I could have done so much with Excel back then).

With ALL that said, I hope I have justified my use of so many charts in our Homeschool. If my kids were burdened by them, I would throw them out for sure. But they really do thrive. When their charts are filled in and used up, they are on me to get a new one printed.

So, I hope you can figure out our reward system. Here's how it works.

Each day the kids have certain chores, schoolwork, activities that earn them points. The points are calculated daily and then added together at the end of the week for their weekly point total. The points can be "cashed-in" for rewards that have different point values.

Now, last year we used this system, but found out that I didn't have enough tally sheets. That's the reason for sooooo many tallies.

Here is the list of items that can be used to earn points (parental discretion adds other items impromptu or permanently on lines provided). I post this on our bulletin board:

Each of my kids gets one of these in there binders each week to use as a DAILY Checklist:

This is a sheet to transfer daily totals over in order to calculate the WEEKLY Total Points (yay for practice adding double digits).  This is also kept in their binders:

This is the sheet where weekly totals are transferred so that they can be spent if desired. I post this on our bulleting board. I usually have the kids do all spending on Fridays:

And last, but not least, this is the List of Rewards that work for my kids and the just how hard we want our kids to work for it. Of course we're constantly adding to this list as motivation changes, but massages are BIG:

Next post perhaps I'll go into detail a little more about the earnable points list?  There are so many opinions about chores, rewards, consequences, etc.  Like anything, I do what works for our family and adjust when it doesn't work.

How about your family? Have any charts that work for your schedule?