Four Seasons

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm trying to pick up on some kindergarden-ish things I might have missed with Owen (5.75) using the ABC Jesus Loves Me 5-year curriculum. Over the past month, we've done a week-at-a-time overview of the four seasons: simple information like what months are in each season, what the weather's like, what holidays are included, and which family birthdays fall at that time. To go along with this, Owen read through the Poppleton series by Cynthia Rylant, even though they're a bit under his reading level (and even though there is no Poppleton in Summer). 

It also gave me an opportunity to do a special craft with just him once a week. All of my kids like to do projects, but Owen is particularly artsy, and it was nice to spend a few brief minutes connecting with him over this each week. The first week, I painted his arm and hand brown, and we made four hand/armprints on four pieces of paper. Each one eventually became a tree, decorated for the season. 

For fall: fingerprint leaves using red and yellow paint, which of course gave us some orange as he painted, too. I liked this one the best.

For winter: puffy paint made with shaving cream, flour, and glue. I used this recipe, but only made a few tablespoons of it and just sort of eye-balled the amounts. In hindsight, I wish I'd though to make the background a different color so you could see the white paint, but he loved it anyway. It's a fun texture.

 

For spring, he dipped a pom-pom into pink paint. This turned out to be a color lesson as well, since I didn't actually have any pink paint and had to mix white and red. Also, the idea for pom-pom painting came right on the heels of watching Creative Galaxy for the first time and our newfound interest in pointilism. 

I had a plan to have him pick a small leaf from outside and do leaf prints in green paint for summer, but we happened to have markers out already when I announced it was "tree time." Before I knew it, he was having a grand old time using all of the different greens he could find in the bucket of markers. Who am I to argue when creativity strikes?!

Levi was really quite frustrated with this whole project. Sure, June, July, and August are typically considered summer months, but since summer actually goes from June 21-September 20, it would make more sense to say July, August, and September, he argued. (Every. week.) Owen, however, looked up as he was coloring his summer tree and casually remarked, "Thanks for doing this, Mommy. I think you chose the perfect tree for each season." What a sweetie!