Fine Arts Fridays, Flies, and a Neat Resource

As the instagram post below mentions, my kiddos and I had fun this week reading the Vietnamese folktale, The Fly. It opened up a lot of fun conversations about how to be clever with words and use them in creative, problem-solving, even funny ways.

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Earlier this week, we read a Vietnamese folktale called The Fly. It is a great story, complete with some amazing word play. We’ve talked about it a lot this week and have enjoyed making riddles for common things, just like they do in the story. . On Fridays, we try to do “Fine Arts Friday.” We have music in the morning and Shakespeare/poetry tea time (today’s reading : The Tempest) and art in the afternoons. . This afternoon, we decided to try our hand drawing flies as our witnesses. (You’ll have to read the story to know what that means. 😉) . I absolutely LOVE the way E’s Fly turned out! ❤️ . (Art tip: I find the kids plug away at art with more enthusiasm when I do it with them. Coloring and drawing is calming for me, so that’s a win! 🙌🏻)

A post shared by s t e p h a n i e l y n n (@essentiallyslcb) on Feb 28, 2020 at 11:59am PST

Language Arts is such a GREAT way to sneak in some of those Big Juicy Conversations that we love to have over here… but you know something else I love to use Language arts for?

As a springboard for Art… art.

Today, staying in theme of flies, we decided to draw them.

Now, we do have a separate, more “classical” art curriculum that we use and enjoy. It officially covers things like shape and light and balance.

But there’s a time and a place for all types of learning, right?

If you don’t already know about, please check out Art for Kids Hub on Youtube. My 7 year old, especially, could watch several of their videos and just draw her day away!

Now, their channel isn’t an art curriculum, per se. But there is definitely value in learning basic things like step-by-step instructions, watching how people make and do certain techniques, etc. It’s nice to see a demo and to be able to pause and rewind if they need to see something again. There’s also a more immediate “look at this!” pride that comes from doing these little videos and being able to draw something in just a few minutes.

Art Hub has SO many videos of all different types of things to draw (and even simpler ones for pre-school ages) that you can more than likely find a video to incorporate in whatever you are learning about. (Hello there, unit study activity!)

With easy resources just a click away, there’s no reason to not incorporate a drawing or two on a Friday.

Or any other day that ends in Y.