Baking and Painting

8/28/11

Material used:

• Now I'm Reading! Playful Pals, Level 1 by Nora Gaydos
• Stockmar Watercolor paint
• Paint Jars and Holder
• Kindergarten Painting Brush 20mm
• Paint board
• Watercolor paper (We got the roll, and then cut to the same size as our main lesson pages, so that we can later bind them together) 
• Painting story from Marsha Johnson's yahoo group

This morning I slept in and Raphen and Kamina had some daddy daughter alone time together. They played lego together, and cooked breakfast together. Kamina's been having a lego kick recently. Too bad that I don't have any picture for this morning. But here are some from earlier days. The one in the bathtub showcases the airplane that she designed and built completely by herself. And the others were when she and daddy built a house for her little lego people to live in. She's really starting to build real projects instead of the exploration stage she was in where it was more about simple stacking aka tower building.



Then apparently she wanted to practice her reading, so she pulled out her little reading book Playful Pals. It's a series of 10 little books with cute pictures and simple sentences that are composed of CVC words and simple sight words.

We haven't really been working on it, but sometimes when she wants we pull it out to practice blending, since she knows her letter sounds fairly well now. However, blending had always taken fair bit of work on her part, and up till now she was doing a lot of guessing of what the words are by interpreting the pictures. This morning, she seems to have had a breakthrough. She read through the first book Rat Naps and most of the second book Fox Hops. She appeared to have remembered some of the words from previous readings (yay for sight words recognition) and for the others she was able to sound them out by blending phonetically. This is all very exciting development. The best part, she wants to do it and is enjoying it.

After a late breakfast/brunch, Kamina and I did our new routine weekend baking together. I've now got into the habit of baking some breakfast food for the week. Kamina loves the cinnamon pull-apart bread so much that it is what we made today. Baking is such a good activity together with children. Yes, it makes the process take longer, but we both enjoy it. She's usually responsible for stirring, measuring, and scooping. I would tell her how much ingredients we need, and she'll measure it out. She's getting fairly good at measuring out the dry ingredients now, though mess is fairly unavoidable. :) She would count how much she has measured, and how much more she still needs to do. Great practical math exercise, and gentle innocent introduction to fractions.

In the evening, we did painting and Kamina was really excited about it. We have done fair bit of watercolor painting last year, but mostly with only one color so that she could get familiar with the process and how each color looks like and how the intensity changes with more or less water. It was also usually free form painting by herself where I was only an observer. This is the first time that I actually painted along side her and was leading the painting process. Daddy premixed the Stockmar Watercolor paint into three little jars of three primary colors. For each primary color, he used 1/8 teaspoon each of the two colors in the same tone and mix with an almost full jar of water. For example, to mix blue, he used 1/8 teaspoon of Ultramarine and 1/8 teaspoon of Prussian Blue. Kamina and I soaked our precut watercolor paper in a tub of water, and filled a couple of jars with water to wash paint brushes with, and we were all set to go.

I read a story adapted from Marsha Johnson's yahoo group file. It's about how the sun shines warm and grass tries to reach up into the sun. Then the flowers don't want to be left behind and open up with the sun and grass. The second time I read the story section by section and we tried to capture the colors portrayed in each section. First we painted the presoaked paper yellow for the sun, then it was the blue on the bottom their of the yellow, which made a pretty green grassland. With little gentle strokes upwards, there came the grass blades reaching up to the sunlight. Finally, we dipped into red and painted round/oval shapes above the grass for flowers opening up.  The pictures turned out really well. I especially like how Kamina's painting turned out. We must have soaked her paper for longer, as the wet-on-wet effect showed up much more prominently in her painting, and you can really see how the colors traveled and blended with each other.

After the story painting, I let Kamina do some free form painting with whatever colors she liked. She decided to do a rainbow in the sky, which also turned out quite nice.

Throughout the painting session, we were very careful about establishing a good habit. We made sure that we washed out paint brushes and dried them thoroughly between colors. We changed washing water regularly. After finishing the session, we washed out and dried the brushes and set our paintings aside to dry.