Kindergarten family portraits

Kindergarten family portraits combining basic shapes to create bodies

Took my two kids to the Corcoran today to see Chris Martin's 'Painting Big'

The Corcoran had a class for families and children ages 5-7 this morning and it was amazing!!! If you ever get a chance to take your kids to their family/child programs there, please do so! Children got to see and talk about Chris Martin's paintings in which he embeds lots of things and images that are meaningful to him. For this class, kids were asked to bring in their own images or items meaningful to them in order to later embed them into their own personal paintings. Nora took images of ballerinas and princesses along with lots of sticker gems. Luke took images of all his favorite scientists and some flat legos. I will post the pictures of their works later but have decided to absolutely do the same project with my Murch students. I love living in DC!! There is never a dull weekend.

Click here to read about the show. I was told that next week they will post all new programming for their winter family events. So check them out!

If there are any families out there who would like to go to these museum events regularly maybe we can form a group. Email me if interested at Miriam.Cutelis@yahoo.com.

Creative family opportunities

Artist Julie Balzer from Balzer Designs, recently posted a video about art journaling (see below) on her website. On nights when we can't do messy art, I find art journaling with my 2 kids much more manageable and still very enjoyable. The key is to get every child a spiral bind art journal of their own so you can all work side by side and to have all your materials at your fingertips. You too will need an art journal of course. We do everything from cutting and gluing, doodling, drawing, coloring with crayons and markers, use stickers, stamps, punchers.....the sky's the limit.

So, I encourage Murch families to try family art journaling. I assure the grown ups will even love it. Enjoy!!

Art Journaling Fast Forward from Julie Balzer on Vimeo.

Note: for kids younger than 1st grade, I might just try giving them a paper to work on instead of a journal for they will not want to 'work' on a page for long.