Making a Mess with Art

As our “school-year” schedule eases up, our “summer-school” schedule begins here—a mix of art and music and nature study. This will be our third summer of this routine, and it’s amazing how quickly this has become a tradition. As soon as the weather starts warming and the trees begin to bloom, our fingers get the itch for messy art.

So we kicked off the season the other day with some chalk pastels. I am a hard-core art wanna-be. I would love to be adept at painting and chalking and drawing and the like. In reality, my work rarely turns out much better than the kids. But we love it.

I’ve perused the chalk tutorials at Hodgepodge for awhile, too nervous to jump in. But finally, I bought a set of pastels and took the plunge. We did the “To the Woods” tutorial as our first study. The kids did really well, and absolutely loved it. I had prepped them in advance. You see, my Oldest is a little OCD when it comes to getting his hands dirty. I wanted to be sure he knew exactly what he was in for. He had so much fun that in the end it didn’t bother him too much to get dirty, especially with a wipe nearby.

Middlest didn’t mind the mess in the least. She got right down to it. And you should have seen her eyes light up when I mentioned that we were turning the chalk on it’s side to color parts of our picture. This is her favorite way to color, and I can’t stand a square crayon so I rarely let her partake in this treat. They both had so much fun with the project that they decided to add some flowers to their path, just wanting to try other colors and prolong the lesson.

Even Littlest got in on the art time. With Mozart playing on my Naxos app on my ipod, we all got our fingers dirty in our first summer lesson of the season. And it felt, oh-so-good!