Summer School and Art Journal Wednesday

Okay, I'm sick of trying to catch up and ignoring the present. And some of you will probably be bored with this because you want to see "real" photos of the kiddos looking cute and cuddly. BUT, I think this is COOL so I'm writing about it! ;-) I'm doing "summer school" with the girls every weekday this summer. Each day we focus on a different subject. Math Mondays. Tuesday is letters/reading. I figured I should break up some of the academic work with something I know will just be fun for the girls so Wednesday is art day. Thursday is vocab/word learning. Friday, we do poem activities. Now, before you get too impressed with me, much of this is simply the girls working in workbooks, or using materials sent home with Ella throughout the school year that we didn't get to, and I saved especially for working on in the summer.

As many of you who follow our blog know, Ella has a motor planning speech disorder called Apraxia. And while we've overcome the hurdle of proper articulation with words, we are now encountering trouble with understanding language. Her expressive language (or getting the words out and in a grammatically correct way) is very deficient. We also figured out that she works VERY VERY hard in class in order to keep up with the rest of the kids. She was doing so well we didn't even know she had a problem until we learned the results of some testing in her speech therapy class. Anyway, I'm going on and on. But basically, I felt I should work with her this summer to help keep her up where she was at the end of kindergarten so she doesn't forget and have to work so hard to relearn things when she starts first grade. We just spend 20-30 minutes each day on the given activity (unless it's art day and then they tend to spend more time). And Lily thinks she's doing "kindergarten" work so she's super proud (even though she's doing preschool workbooks). Hey, she's interested, I'm for whatever she wants to think and it's all getting ready for kindergarten anyway.

For Art Journal Wednesdays, I used a few different sites to figure out what I'm going to do each week but I always go back to Kathy Barbaro's Art Projects for Kids site. She has Art Journal ideas on there. Many of them seem to be for a bit older kids. But I liked the idea of having one sketch book where all their weekly projects could be kept. So I bought them each their own book and some art supplies that we use ONLY when we do our Wednesday art projects. This keeps them special and exciting to use. And also keeps the supplies nice and not lost all over the house with lids missing, etc.

Our first project was a self portrait. I just told the girls to draw a picture of themselves and then maybe some fun things around them that they like.
Here's what they came up with:

Do you see Lily's "old bear" and "new bear" there? I think that is so cute!
The person in the middle is a "mistake" and she started over with the "real" Lily on the right. :-)
Ella obviously took her time with this. She drew herself walking in the street (she told me why, but I can't remember now). In her hand on the left there is her current favorite stuffed animal. It's a mini polar bear.

Never fear, I will continue to update the blog with past posts, but I will also update with our weekly art project. So stayed tuned! I know you're thrilled! ;-)