Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

March 24th, 2012 by sara

Art Gallery

The kids have been drawing up a storm around here for the past few months. Nora, ever inspired by her big brother, is becoming quite the portrait artist. They’re always asking to ‘do projects’ and get out markers, scissors, glue, etc. There are some days where the sheer amount of paper they go through is a bit overwhelming, but I don’t get tired of seeing these creations.

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And now for the art…

I’ll do Nora’s first. Almost all of her drawings are of ‘smiley faces’. She was thrilled to find that she could draw things that actually looked like faces about a month ago and since then has continued to add features and expressions. It’s really fun to see how her drawing has changed, just in several weeks.  She also likes to ask Jonah to add teeth after she draws a big happy mouth. He enjoys that job. :)

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Here’s a good sample of the cut-and-glue projects that Nora enjoys.

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When we get out the paints, she LOVES to paint her palms and make handprints.

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This guy has glasses and cheeks!

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Here she put the tooth/tongue and ears on by herself. He was going for a walk.  The blue zigzags are ‘words’, but I can’t remember what they said.

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I just love the face on this one. :)

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Now to transition into the Jonah projects, here’s one from an afternoon where they both drew our family.

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Jonah still makes the occasional trucks and trains, but he’s really been working on his people lately, too.

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Awww…  Nora’s crying….    And the guy at the bottom is telling us his name: Becence  (Jonah makes up great names for his guys.)

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This bug loves Jonah.

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More family portraits – the bottom one is Dad happily doing ‘train stories on Miyrance Island’ in the bedroom.

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Here’s a drawing of when Sean took the kids on a hike up Mt. Pisgah. I love where Jonah drew Sean carrying Nora in the hiking backpack. :)

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And a drawing of Eugene! Complete with raindrops, the Willamette River, and people walking and riding bikes (in the rain).

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And he’s kind of excited about baseball starting up again. Can you imagine?

And how great is the Phillie Phanatic??

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Jonah also does a lot of writing. He’s getting much faster, so he likes to write lots of notes to us, especially to Dad.

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There you have it. Now if you multiply what you saw above by about 100, you can imagine what they churn out in a week. :)

February 24th, 2012 by sara

Valentine Factory

I saw the idea for these valentines online, and since Jonah (and Nora) have both been obsessed with googly eyes and ‘projects’ lately, I knew it would be the perfect valentines for Jonah to make for his school friends this year.

Making smiley faces

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Gluing on the heads

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Writing on the names

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All done!

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Nora also got dressed up all cute for the day. (Jonah really wanted to get in on the pictures for some reason.)

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“Mama, what these funny kind of pants called?”

“Tights, sweetie. They’re called tights.” :)

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January 24th, 2012 by sara

Making Stuff

With all the time we’ve been spending indoors lately, between sickness and the heavy rain, the kids have done a lot of projects with their art supplies.  Jonah’s been doing a lot of cutting and gluing things, like this mini-Jonah.

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Many of his projects are also inspired by his favorite musician, Caspar Babypants. One day, he wanted to remake all of Caspar’s album covers to hang on the wall of his bedroom.

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And he also wrote out all the lyrics to his favorite song, Googly Eyes, and turned it into a book so Dad would know all the words. Here’s one page (there are 10 more like it).

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He’s also been playing concerts with lots of Caspar Babypants songs, and told me that he needed a cardboard guitar case like Dad’s to take his guitar to his concerts. So one afternoon, we made one.

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The video that goes along with the song is also one of the kids’ favorites – they watched it about a million times while they were sick, and Jonah likes to copy the drawings on the magna doodle while he sings the song. Nora has been closely watching this for a couple of weeks now and has started drawing her own ‘googly-eye faces’.

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Here’s a little video of the happy artist in action.

Paints are frequently requested, too. :)

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April 17th, 2011 by sara

Trains and Drawings

Last weekend, we saw that Toys-R-Us was having a Thomas activity day, so we went to check it out and the kids loved playing at the train table.

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And of course, Nora’s right there, figuring out how to play, too.

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Then that afternoon, Jonah and I walked over to the fairgrounds where they were having a model railroad show, and he put a smile on the faces of many old train collectors with his excited yells about some engine or freight car that he saw. He even got to use the controller for one of the little engines and made it go forward and backward.

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And now some of Jonah’s recent drawings…

He drew me “a replay” of something he saw in a baseball game because I missed it and he felt that it was very important for me to see what happened. Here we have the pitcher (in blue) on the mound throwing the ball to the batter who’s standing in his batter’s box. They are even wearing cleats (my favorite part).

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Then the second baseman had to dive to catch the ball and get to second base to get the runner out. Also, it is a night game with a moon and some stars. (He’s been working very hard trying to draw stars lately. Nora really likes it when I draw stars for her, and I think it makes him want to draw them, too.)

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Earlier this week, I was doing something with Nora, and Jonah was working at his table. He was making up rules for a game that he thought of using his ‘Thomas reader’, which is one of those red cellophane things you can hold over a special design to see the ‘secret’ message underneath. He was very proud to explain the rules to me. It says, “Flip the Thomas reader arond and arond til Thomas reader lands on one of the engines we hvint seen before.” (You kind of have to look around the page for the words near the end – ‘on one of the engines’ is mirror image at the bottom). :)

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And when that happened, we got to cross off a number on the scoreboard he made to go with this game.

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A dump truck driving on a sunny AND rainy day, so there’s also a rainbow, of course!

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Finally, Nora gets a turn to try drawing on the iPad, because if Jonah does it…

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She draws a lot of ‘ducks’ and is very pleased with herself when she does. :)

March 24th, 2011 by sara

Dry Erase

Jonah recently discovered the joy of the dry-erase board and has moved many of his drawing and writing activities to that surface. I love coming over to see what he’s working on and finding this like this:

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He was really excited to show me that he made “a great octagon” for the stop sign on the side of the bus.

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And then wanted to make his bus happy, too, since it was such a sunny day.

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Then this morning, he wouldn’t let Sean leave for work until he could ask him this question in writing. :)

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Completely unrelated, I finished making a banana out of felt today for the kids to play with.

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And Jonah was very excited that it can split in half! (It’s held together by magnets on the inside.)

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He spent a good part of the afternoon asking me if I’d like to share a banana with him, and cracking up at how the halves ‘pop’ back together whenever they get close to each other.

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