CCCW - Renouf Tree Settings

In our biology and botany studies we have been learning about the basics of plants and right now more specifically trees and leaves. While looking for an autumn art project on leaves, I found and fell in love with Eloise Renouf's style of drawing trees as first seen in this sketchbook project. We just had to do something with this!

We used white cardstock and black Sharpie pens. A basic straight-line tree trunk works fine, or you can add a thicker trunk. Choose multiple designs to repeat for the branches. (For inexperienced/unsure artists, practice on scratch paper first.)

Now it's time to paint! Watercolors add both color and additional shape.

Once the kids were done with theirs, they were to use their favorite finished piece as the setting for a new piece of creative writing.

I found creating fall images this way absolutely addicting and made page after page over the course of a few days.

Trees and/or scenes can be as simple or elaborate as each artist wishes, and all skill levels can give this a good go.

Happy Autumn, Happy Homeschooling!

CCCW - Roget and The Right Word

As an unapologetic logophile and someone who owns and frequently uses 10 different thesauruses, I was delighted to find the awesome biographical picture book The Right Word - Roget and His Thesaurus. Not only does this book give an astounding amount of information about a remarkable person, Peter Roget, it is also a visual delight in its illustrations (hence the Caldecott honor). 

I used this book both for Biography Club and creative writing. Inspired by the story and illustrations, and my newfound knowledge that thesaurus is Greek for "treasure house," I created this to show at Biography Club as I shared the story of Roget.

The next day I talked more about the book with my own children and asked them to each re-read it on their own, slowly drinking in the pictures. I then tasked them with making their own synonymous, listed creation as an artistic approach to playing with words.  Here are a couple of their creations.

CCCW - Pumpkin Characters

Inspired by an idea I saw by that artist woman, I came up with a plan for a timely, festive two-part project where we artfully created characters and settings for some creative writing.

First, I read a few picture books for example and inspiration...because picture books are awesome!

I'm not going to write an art tutorial because you can go here to find that. I did switch it up a bit, though, so I'll explain that. Instead of painted paper for the weaving, we used patterned scrapbooking paper as was originally done at Cutting Tiny Bites. And instead of a green frame, we used black so we could use pastels on a nighttime background to create our story settings. (I love, love to use pastels on black paper, so I'm always looking for a reason to do it!)

Here is a closeup of mine, all finished. I even add the Big Dipper to my sky!

Here are all of the finished characters.

I'm a huge proponent of CCCW--Cross Curricular Creative Writing. Go here to see another fun example perfect for this time of year.