We've been studying the history of art at co-op these past two months. The class is being taught by one of our wonderfully talented co-op mothers and I have really enjoyed being a casual participant. Every week, she sends home several projects ideas. The children are supposed to complete them as written, or do a similar project that they or their  parents might think up.

My mom was in town for the first two weeks of co-op, so we were taking break from our other schoolwork. This gave the children a lot of free time, so the first week's of projects were a lot fancier than the later ones.  For Ancient Art, the assignment was to do a cave painting using a brown paper bag as your "painting" surface.

Since it has been a while since we have done an papier mache, I suggested that my oldest son make a cave diorama for his cave paintings.

He liked this idea and made a second diorama for Egyptian Art.

There actually wasn't a project for Egyptian Art, but the two younger boys each made a picture anyway.

The Greek Art project was supposed to be painting pottery. Since we had already done several projects like this when we studied Greece two years ago, we decided to try a project we hadn't done- scratch art!

The younger boys had a great time coloring, painting, and scraping.

For Roman Art, the children were supposed to make a mosaic. There is no way I was going to afford materials for five children to make real mosaics, so we settled for the paper variety.

However, I really WANTED the children to be able to experience making a "real" mosaic. While shopping in the local bakery and bulk foods store, I spotted some chocolate rocks and inspiration struck. Why not make a mosaic on a sugar cookie?! We ended up purchasing several kinds of dried fruit and my 12 year old designed a delicious mosaic snack to share with all his friends. (CHEF are the initials of our co-op.)

My 12 year old son and my 11 year old daughter decided to combine the first three projects by making miniture art museums to showcase their work. My son did this in the form of a pop-up inside of a file folder. This was then three hole punched so he could store it in his notebook.

And my daughter made hers inside of a small cardboard box.