A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

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Three Middle School Books

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Today I want to take a moment to talk to you about three middle school books I’ve recently had a chance to review.

First up is.. what I thought was a touch of an odd book..The title is Secrets of the Dragon Tomb.The characters were interesting and the story was a clever mystery and had twists and turns that kept me alert, but I still thought… it’s an odd book.   A mystery wrapped up in a fantasy world.  

The  setting is high society Mars.  Strange
clockwork machines,. Pterodactyls gliding through the sky, automatic
servants hard at work, and in the
north, the great dragon tombs hide marvels of Ancient Martian
technology.

Twelve-year-old Edward Sullivan has always dreamed of becoming a spy ….
Instead, he spends his days keeping his eccentric family from complete
disaster.  BUT THEN his family is kidnapped.  Edward is off to save them. He discovers that spywork is a bit more challenging than he had imagined. . . .

This book was written by  Patrick Samphire and illustrated by Jeremy Holmes.

Recommend it?  I think so.   It’s oddity is kinda appealing.   It’s not fine literature, but it was entertaining seeing how this eccentric family ended up working together to save the day.

 Patrick Griffin’s Last Breakfast on Earth.   Written by Ned Rust.

Mr. Rust introduces us to Patrick, the middle child in a family with seven children.   It’s a busy household with a boy in the middle of it who liked science… who could have guessed that such a love would get him into such a mess of trouble?

Alternate realities exist!  Earth – Ith.  Celebrate the odd, teach the expected, be plugged in at all times, or not.   Meet the proscribed rules, do what needs to be done.   or hold on…

Perhaps one should work to save the world?   Yeah, work to save the world and have the biggest adventure of your life.

Recommend it? This book intrigued me.  🙂   It was a fun read, and I think most middle schoolers would get a kick out of it.

Wolf Keepers by Elise Broach.

Take two children, who form an unlikely alliance, one secure in her family relationship, the other not, the setting… John Muir Wildlife Park.   Add a mystery…something is happening with the wolves at the zoo.   Strange noises and happenings at night…the wolves are dying and no one knows why.  Add the intrigue of John Muir and his lost cabin..can it still be around?

Two snoopy youth, a fast moving vehicle, Yosemite Park, a mystery solved.  History explained.

Recommend it? I have to admit, my son and I loved this book.  Well written with excellent character development.  Good cliff-hangers.  Great story line that left room for questions and considerations…it’s good to see a book make a lad think.   I so enjoy watching that.

So there you have it, three very different from each other books….but all with their own intrigues to them.   Depending on what your middle schoolers like to read, these three books just might fit the bill eh?

All these books were sent to me courtesy of Raincoast Books.

Art Series: Arnold’s Extraordinary Art Museum

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I have to admit, when I first opened this book I thought…okay.. what
kind of a weird little art book is this?  So I read it through, and then
read it again because it intrigued in it’s in weirdness. It’s weirdness turned into a quirky way of  presenting different forms of
art and ended up really intriguing
me.  I think it will intrigue you too.

 You might be asking, what makes this book quirky?

Well, it’s done
in a comic book format, it’s a lovely hardcover book with great colour
throughout from front to back.  The characters are a tad unusual, but
they all have a great attitude and they all work with each other.

Arnold
puts on an art show for his friends.   He is the collector and curator
of the art museum, who wants to share his art collection with his
friends.   He leads them on a marvelous adventure and they all learn
much.

 Imagine if you could go to an art museum where you actually have to
experience the art yourself.. like crawling through a tunnel to get to a
Japanese tea room?  What if you learned how fascinating the colour blue
was and how hard it was to prefect it?

Could you see a urinal as
a piece of art?  Find it interesting to learn why ultramarine was used
so often in pictures of the Madonna?  What about seeing the shadows or
spaces of objects as the intrigue of artists?   I learned so much from
this book, it was very neat.

At the close of the book, images of
the actual art used and where they are found is depicted.   Some of the
pieces were quite interesting, some more so after the reasoning behind
them was given.

 It was so interesting to learn more about the different forms that art
can take and some of the history and thought that go on behind them. 
There is more to art than what you can just see.

I do have to tell you that I used this book with my art class….and they were delighted.  This book really resonated with my art students.   Check out the art project they came up.  🙂

They started with circles and exploring that space, then someone got the bright idea of exploring what they can do with their hands, and then …what if we mixed colours together and swirled them around, and what if we drop lids upside and … it kinda went on and on from there.   It was a great finish off for our art class as the students had learned to work together and feed off each others ideas.  

 Arnold’s Extraordinary Art Museum

Written/Illustrated by:
Catherine Ingram and Jim Stoten

Published by: Laurence King

Size: 10.1 x 12.06 Â·

64 pages
Ages 7 and up

Reviewed For: Raincoast Books.

Amazon affiliate links are provided for your ease of finding this
quirky book.  It doesn’t affect your bottom line and blesses my heart
more than you know.  🙂   No pressure, but if you are intrigued by the
book, get it!  Links are below.
 Amazon.ca: Arnold’s Extraordinary Art Museum

Amazon.com: Arnold’s Extraordinary Art Museum

Art Series: Art Lab for Kids

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Welcome Wren to my blog today!!!   Yes, she is a total sweetheart to help me out with my art series.  She’s going to be talking about a wonderful book called Art Lab of Kids by Susan Schwake.   You will normally find Wren (and her sister) blogging at FinchnWren.
How do you approach art in your home or homeschool? Are you a
naturally talented artist yourself, for whom art creation just flows
out? Or, are you someone who would love to teach art but have no
ideas of where or how to start? Let me encourage you, if you fit
into this last category: it’s much easier than you imagine! Even
if you are not a trained artist, you really can teach the subject of
art to your own children. There are so many books and resources
available today to help you along in this. I’d like to share a
very well-rounded book to help you in this journey: Susan Schwake’s
ART LAB FOR KIDS. I refer to this book all the time for both
our own homeschool art, and for the art class I teach in our local
homeschool coop. What a resource!
 
ART LAB FOR KIDS is subtitled “52 Creative Adventures in
Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media.”
Practically, that means you could take one adventure per week and
have a year’s worth of art to do in your homeschool! Ms. Schwake’s
book contains practical, step-by-step instructions, lots of photos,
and pictures of completed artworks so that the artist (or mom)
understands exactly how to teach and create each project. The author
also provides a great resource list of recommended media in the first
section, explaining how different ones work and can be used. She is
an artist and art teacher with 20 years’ experience, so she brings
both the ability to clearly teach and a huge depth of art idea
resources to the reader.
ART LAB FOR KIDS has sections which cover the following:
  • How to use the book and how to create art with others
  • Drawing (ink, scribble, pastels, crayon, and more)
  • Painting (miniature, Fauvist, charcoal, watercolor, tempera, etc.)
  • Printmaking (silkscreen, stencil, cardboard relief, gelatin, and
    more)
  • Paper (stamps, tissue, torn-paper, Pop Art, vellum…)
  • Mixed Media (charcoal/watercolor, photos, watercolor and pencil,
    portraits, batik…)

While I think that ART LAB FOR KIDS would be ideal used as a
curriculum, I have personally just read through it many times and
selected specific art projects to teach, based on what my students
were learning or what we found most interesting. Some projects we
thoroughly enjoyed completing were painting an enlarged tiny section
of a painting on a small square; “Painting in the Style of…,”
and “Text as Texture.” And that’s only a fraction of the
projects offered in this book. We’re looking forward to painting
on tiny pieces of wood; reverse landscapes; gelatin monoprinting; and
many more!
 
I recommend this book for anyone who’d like to go deeper into the
world of artmaking, or art teaching, in a variety of art styles.
These vivid, fascinating projects will keep you busy for hours and
hours, happily creating!
Enjoy!
Wren from FinchnWren.
You can find this book through my affiliate links (helping to support this blog).
Amazon.ca
Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media-For Budding Artists of All Ages
Amazon.com
Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media-For Budding Artists of All Ages (Lab Series)

Linked up here:

Virtual Fridge Link Up

Jumping Around This Week

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Since I’ve been battling illness yet this week, our schooling is still not back on track.

I have been trying though to do a bit more.

We’ve done a bit of reading in our history encyclopedia, story of the world, wolf keepers (which is a great read!), wonders of the ancient world and coyotes.

The lad is continuing re-reading the Warrior Cat series.   I’ve spent sometime listening to book 12 of the Ranger’s Apprentice Series.  I’ve also scheduled a few blog posts.

In our reading we came across some interesting “let’s learn more ideas”.  

To that end we’ve learned about Japan’s Keyhole graves.   You can see a link all about them here.

We learned a bit about St. Peter’s Basilica as we tried to build a 3D model of it.

We listened to some coyote noises.

We also then hunted up what some of those noises meant. Adirondack Almanack helped.

Most days the lad did his Veritas History and Bible, and worked through his smarts.   More about them here, Working through our Smarts.    We’ve struggled to get in a whole lot more.   I could tell he’s getting on the mend as Thursday and Friday he was begging his dad to take him out pokemon go-ing and these last two weeks that hasn’t come up at all.   SO YEAH!!!!!   Perhaps we’re going to kick this bug after-all eh!  🙂

What else?

OH… I can’t forget to tell you about this COOL virtual tour of St. Peter’s.   Check it out here!

The rest of the time the lad played computer games, read, tidied his room and chilled out.   He continued with doing his archery, karate and Cadet meeting.   I did a lot of sitting, handling digestive upset due to a new med, got some blood work done (learned I’m a bit anemic) and generally worked to get better.   I did some blogging, sleeping, TV watching and eating of tootsie rolls (see crave).

Since I’ve been mostly chair bound and getting more mentally alert (another yeah!!!) I’ve been doing some blogging.   I also switched blogs.   I used to do most of my blogging on Weebly, but lately it’s having issues with my server and I said “nuts to this” and have moved back to my blogger account full time.  I will have the LONG job of copying over my posts from there, but what’s a gal to do eh?

But back to the point at hand:

Word Prompts posts 

These are just FUN to do.  They are normally short and sweet, and let’s me feel creative.  🙂
What I crave.   Five minute Friday post
Weather.  Inspired by my international student
Decorate.   Tis the season you know?
Lesson.   Illness teaches much.

Life and Faith

Field Trip to Fort York.   A trip to Fort York in Toronto.
God sought a man.   Ezekiel 22
God’s sword is out.  Ezekiel 21
Book Club: The book of Negroes.   What the title says.  Good book.
Sunday Sermon: Keep awake, be alert.
Hymn Study: Rejoice, rejoice, believers.

Homeschooling and Reviews

Alpha-Mania Adventures. Prereaders phonics and phonemes program.
Working through our Smart books.   What this part of our dailies is.
Art Series: Draw, paint, print like the great artists.   GREAT BOOK for doing art lessons.
Seasonal Books to Enjoy.   Two fun books.

(link up is here)

Homeschool Coffee Break
The Homeschool Post

Art Series: Draw, Paint, Print like the Great Artists

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Don’t you love when you find a book that works great for a class you want to teach?   When I first saw this book “Draw  Paint Print like the Great Artists” by Marion Denchars I thought THIS book will be awesome to use in an art classes with a group of children.

And you know what… IT WAS!   🙂

I have to tell you how much fun we had with this 224 page book.   18
different artists that we could discuss it was hard to break it down to
just 6 classes.

One of the artists we learned about was Sonia Delaunay, was a Ukrainian-French artist who work explodes with colourful shapes in unexpected rhythms and patterns.   She loves to do abstract art.    Her work was always infused with abstract, geometric, and brightly coloured patterns.

Check out some of the work the children did.

I just love how the children took the ideas they learned and let them play out in their own ways.  Circles, layers, rectangles, and more.  I was particularly impressed with this one.

The young person who made this is a very shy quiet lad.   He needed a certain amount of prompting and quiet encouragement to attempt his hand.   Circles didn’t appeal to this lad, and he seemed rather uncertain so I read out the description of Ms. Delaunay s work about how it showed geometric shapes.  That peeked his interest so I said.. you know geometic shapes like circles and triangles, and rectangles and squares…and he was off to the races.  🙂   It was SO delightful to see this young fellow grab hold and figure out how to make it all work.     He was bravely different and I love it.  THIS is what I love about teaching art classes, and books like this that inspire and give ideas… I love them.

This is such a great book to use.

If you just want to use it within your family that would be very doable, or if you want to gift a child, this book is meant to used and worked with.

Pages where you can make a self portrait, do aboriginal drawing, learn to use space and so much more.

 
 

 

 

The set up is fairly simple.
Learn about the artist.  See examples of their style.   Learn how to copy that style.  Pages are given if using with an individual student to use, or you can just take the information and talk to a class of children and teach it.  This is a marvellous resource that I plan to use again with another class. 

I will continue to use it with my son in his schooling as well.. but art with a class is SO MUCH FUN.   Ideas that are spawned off each other… it’s amazing to see the encouragement given, the delight in a child’s eyes when they learn something new and accomplish it and the variety AND sense of pride that doing your own thing, while meeting the challenge of an artists gives.

It’s why I like teaching art to children… in my own way.  🙂 

Now I would be remiss if I failed to tell you where I got this great book, it comes my way courtesy of Raincoast Books.  224 pages, 18 artists, great for children 8-12 (or older), published by Laurence King and is about 8 x 11 inches.  Printed on heavier paper to withstand the rigors of being used by an artist.