Baking Week

It was suggested to me by a friend to start a blog about my projects with my kids during the covid-19 pandemic.  Thought I'd start this up again and see how it goes.  I try to watch PBS News Hour every day to stay up to date with everything going on.  I really feel for parents during all of this.  Especially parents with kids with special needs.  Our teachers are SO important in our society.  It really does take a certain type of person to be an educator, in my opinion.  And some parents are not, and that's okay!  That's why we have schools!  Or at least we did...  It will be interesting to see what happens this fall with our education system.  With my eldest going into kindergarten.  I'm nervous and curious to see what they do about the classroom this coming fall.  

So in absence of school and libraries for my kids we do things at home that I have picked up from what my daughter did at her preschool and what they do at story time at our library.  I pick a theme over the weekend to do throughout the week.  My daughter had school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  So I tend to do writing and that type of things with her on those days to keep that up.  (Which the past two or three weeks I've definitely slacked on that one!)  I try to do an art craft at least once during the week.  I try to read books on the theme at least on MWF.  I kind of slack off a bit on Tuesday and Thursday to give them a break.  I know it's not the best policy to do, but we incorporate TV and/or movies with our theme of the week.  Because I still have to get the dishes and laundry done... And my son won't leave me alone if he's not occupied by a screen.  Even then he sometimes gets bored and finds me.  Outside time is put in in our mornings as well on the nice days.  That usually takes up at least an hour of our morning.  

So back to BAKING WEEK!  I really only did it Friday, I'll be honest.  So we started with Blippi.  My son LOVES Blippi, and my daughter too.  My daughter likes a lot of different things right now, but Blippi is at the top of my son's list of things to watch.  He has a video on visiting a bakery and he goes behind the scenes and makes things at the bakery.  

We haven't baked in a while at our house so we made soft ginger cookies Friday too.  If you make it from the link, it's a double batch from what's in their cookbook I have.  And we alter the spices at our house too.  Definitely recommend them, they're my husband and my favorites!

We read "In the Night Kitchen" by Maurice Sendak the other day.  I should have read "The Little Red Hen" with them.  I love that Golden Book.  Verizon sent links with free service to a few educational site until June 22nd in an email.  I took part in the Epic! site.  My daughter LOVES it!  They have a reading buddy feature.  They read books for 20 minutes and they get to feed their pet a snack.  They have a great selection of non-fiction books that we really liked to get at the library when we lived in Columbus, OH.  They have a fair amount here in Muncie, IN, but not as much as they did in Columbus.  So today we read two books on that website about baking.  Really cute books.  "Save the Cake" by Molly Coxe and "Grandma's Kitchen" by Madison Lodi.  "Save the Cake" is felted and fabric animals photographed for the illustrations.  "Grandma's Kitchen" is illustrated by Francesca De Luca and I really like her style.  

Thursday we made a three tiered cake out of construction paper, buttons, ribbon, cardboard, and stickers.  We practice using markers, colored pencils, crayons, and gluing.  I didn't end up having them cut with scissors today.  I cut out the shapes to save time of the cake layers.  They helped me glue them together.  My daughter glued lots of buttons on herself.  I don't know if anyone remembers the song "not a river, not a lake, not a puddle, not a stream" from elementary school about glue.  I taught it to my daughter.  She puts so much glue on the back of buttons and apologizes so much for it because I taught her the song!  Haha!  She keeps doing it though, haha.  

Before lunchtime we turned on Sleeping Beauty so I could finish baking the cookies.  Why Sleeping Beauty you ask?  For the cake baking part of course!  Love the mess they make trying to make Briar Rose's birthday special without their magic, such a fun scene.  We made it to lunchtime with out too much of a crying issue with both kids!  What a day/week.  I've been struggling with feeling exhaustion.  Haven't felt that way in months.  I haven't been very motivated to stay on track with keeping the kids engaged in something other than TV lately.  It's been bad for three weeks now.  I think I'll be better this coming week.  I have a plan!  Check back in the coming week to see what we do.  Thanks for reading!

Weekly inspiration No.1

Lately Kevin and I have talked about how I haven't really done any artwork in probably a year now.  I've done some photography here and there, but never really been active in my artwork.  So I thought about our conversations a lot and came up with an idea.  The idea is to look at other artwork and artists again to hopefully get inspired to create my own again.  I will research an artist a week and post my thoughts on the artist here in my blog every week.  This week I decided to research Paul Klee.  Here's what I've found and what my thoughts are on this artist.

Nocturnal Festivities, 1921

This is one of my favorites that I've seen so far of his work.  Klee was known for his "pointillism" style he used a lot.  He used a needle on blackened glass to draw when he was younger.  He also seems to use an etching technique in a lot of his work.  If you can think back to your grade school days and ever did an art class where you scratch away black paint to reveal color underneath...  He used a similar type of technique a lot in his work.  There seems to be a lot of layers to some of his artwork.  He used a lot of different surfaces to work with too.  He used a lot of gauze and burlap in his work.  He liked to mix mediums as well.

Ad Parnassum, 1932

This is considered to be one of his masterpieces according to a few articles I've read so far.  This showcases his pointillism technique.  I guess this was one of his larger works as well.  He tended to work small.

Burg und Sonne (Castle and Sun), 1928

This painting is really interesting to me because it is used in schools teaching geometric shapes.  I'm sure there are other lessons you could learn from this painting,  but that seems to be the main lesson from this painting.  There are actual lesson plans made revolving around this painting.

Siblings, 1930

I think this one is my favorite I've seen so far.  This kind of puts together his love of shapes and his surrealist flare.  I don't know if he ever really considered himself apart of the surrealist movement, but it was said that he really admired Pablo Picasso and actually got to meet him.  When describing his style of painting a lot of genres are listed.  Wikipedia lists his influences of expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.   You can really see the texture in the background in this painting.

Paul Klee was born in Switzerland and died in Switzerland, but he also lived in Germany a lot of his life as well.  His father was a musician and was brought up to also be a musician, but decided it wasn't for him.  Although a lot of things I read said that people can tell he has musical training and a mind of a musician

Insula Dulcamara, 1938.

Insula Dulcamara is an example of one of his later works.  He used a lot of bold and think lines in his paintings.  You can see a lot of texture in the background again in this one.  He collaged things in this piece.  I really enjoy that about his work.  

Klee died two years later in 1940.  He finished a whopping total of around 9000 pieces of artwork in his career!  That's so impressive.  He taught as a professor at the Bauhaus for 10 years, and at the Dusseldorf Academy for three years.  He also had some pieces in the 1937 German "Degenerate Art" exhibition.  

He apparently had a disease later in his life called scleroderma.  It's an autoimmune disease that attacks healthy tissues in your body.  It creates hardened skin and can effect your organs.  Apparently he had a hard time swallowing because of the disease. People say you can see his pain in some of his later pieces.  It really started to effect him later in his career up until his death.

Red Balloon, 1922.

I leave you with another of my favorites.  It's been fun learning about a new to me artist these past 4 days.  I'll start a new artist tomorrow so I can be on a regular week schedule for this project I'm starting.  Through the things I've read about Paul Klee, he seemed to be his own person but didn't reject things that he experienced in his life.  For example, music... His father was a musician and his mother was a singer.  He played music growing up and I think he still played throughout the rest of his life.   He married a pianist as well.  And people say they can see the influence of music in his artwork which I find interesting.

He seemed to do his own thing.  He wanted to experience things for himself and let it reflect in his artwork.  He traveled to Tunisia and he said it changed his life forever in how he viewed color.  It seemed as though he never really said he was apart of any movement really.  His work is always classified as something different on a lot of websites I looked at his artwork.  Some say expressionism some call it surrealist.   I wonder what he would've thought about that.

I feel like I'm rambling a bit here, but all in all I'm so glad I learned about Paul Klee.  I enjoy his different techniques and especially that he did a lot of mixed media in his work.  As I enjoy doing that as well.  I hope you enjoyed reading my perspective on Paul Klee and hope you learned a little something about him too.