Black and Purple Petunias, by Georgia O'Keeffe

I really love it when I can combine lessons!  And yesterday I was able to combine many lessons into one fantastic project!  For this year, I have our Art and Music lessons scheduled on Wednesdays.  We do not try to accomplish a great amount of other subjects this day, because I wanted this day to mostly focus on this.  Because the truth is that Art projects usually take a larger amount of time, but they are so worth it!

I'm going to attempt to walk you step-by-step through what we did:

1) Read a Book:  Through Georgia's Eyes, by Rachel Rodriquez

- This is truly a great living book on the life of Georgia O'Keefe!  It was our favorite that we checked out at the library.

2) Discussed Ms. O'Keeffe's Style of Painting Flowers.

- I showed them several examples of Georgia's flower paintings.  We discussed how she saw great beauty in flowers and she painted them big, close-up, and colorful in hopes that other people could see them the way she would!  Isn't that beautiful?  I want others to see them that way as well!

3)  Nature Walk

- Took a nature walk focused on looking at the details of wildflowers.  Each of the children picked their favorite flower, which they would be using for an art project.  Hannah and Alex both picked Chicory, I picked Spotted Touch-Me-Not, and Gabby picked a Robin's Plantain.

Also while we were on our nature walk, using super macro on the camera, the kids and I tried our hand at taking wildflower photos as close up as possible, just like Georgia would have liked it! After uploading the photos on our computer, we cropped them in even closer!  Can you see the beauty?

Chicory

Queen Anne's Lace

Black-Eyed Susan 

After returning inside and placing our picked flowers in some water vases, I moved onto the next step.

4) Read the Summer Section of Nature's Paintbox, by Patricia Thomas

- We've been working our way through the seasons in the above book.  Our Spring study can be found HERE.  For Summer, the illustrations are done in watercolors, my personal favorite art medium.  So, we used watercolors to do our art project!

5) Listen to The Four Seasons - Summer, Masters of Classical Music - Antonio Vivaldi

- I put this CD on to listen to while completing our Art project - specifically on The Four Seasons - Summer suite.  I reminded the kids about the last time we listened to Vivaldi and about The Four Seasons suites.  And like the last time we listened to it, we discussed the music and how it sounded like the season.

6) Complete Art Project:  Georgia O'Keeffe Watercolor Flowers

- The children used their selection of wildflower to paint a watercolor picture, George O'Keeffe style.  I gleaned this art idea from this book:  Discovering Great Artsts, by MaryAnn Kohl.

The two older children used Reeve's brand watercolors, it's an excellent quality paint for the price, and Loew-Cornell brand artist brushes.  For the toddler, Crayola watercolors and brush worked just fine! ;)

Alex is my art scoffer, so sometimes I can expect refusal from him, but he gave this project a try!  However, he did not like working with the watercolors and became very frustrated and discouraged with his work.  He was about to quit and I asked him if he'd like to try a different medium.  He chose good old-fashioned crayons.  And he ended up very pleased with his project!  And he got the point - he drew a smaller Chicory in the background and a larger one in the front to get your attention - Georgia style.

Hannah also did a great job with her Chicory.

And, of course, I couldn't refuse trying my hand at it!

Spotted Touch-Me-Not

Gabby, well, she did her painting "toddler-style" and only painted for about 3 minutes!

We used our final projects as a fantastic addition to our nature journals!!