A sweet friend e-mailed me one day earlier this summer and asked if I'd like to borrow an extra copy of her CD: The Phonics of Drawing.  I had been reading her blog and seeing some nifty results.  So I elatedly said yes!

We completed the first few lessons before we left for vacation.

We practiced drawing shapes...

and more shapes.

We learned a little about perspective. This was cool because we read about this technique when we studied the Renaissance last year.  Here is ds'... 

Then we learned about light and shadow while drawing teddy bears...

Here is dd's...

Mine...

and ds'...

We used charcoal for all of these, which is extremely messy.  I was excited about doing the perspective exercise because we learned about it when we studied Leonardo da Vinci in TOG Y2U2. We had hoped to see one of his pieces in Washington DC but we ran out of time to do that particular museum. 

We actually did the teddy bears twice because one of the supplies we used was the wrong one!  This was a rather frustrating project at the time, but now we think these bears are cool.  Also, while on vacation in Virginia, we took pictures of many things that entailed light and shadow.  So I guess this charcoal lesson sort of rubbed off on us!  LOL

I'm going through over 1000 photos from our vacation.  We went to Colonial Williamsburg and got to meet George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, who nicknamed my son, "the young historian"!  We also went to Mount Vernon, Washington DC, Montpelier and Monticello.  Stay tuned!