Sam's Art Unit

Usually between Christmas and New Years, when Sam is mostly home from work, he teaches a unit to the kids on something he's interested in. This year he taught a general Art Unit. I didn't get many pictures, and I don't have his lesson plan, but he talked about a bunch of design principles and Gestalt theory and how these principles contribute to a pleasing work of art. These are just some pictures of the notes the kids took and some drawings they did, to remind us that we did this unit at all!

The kids love learning from Sam and several of them want to be artists, so this was a really fun unit for them!

Car Design and Logo Design

Sam taught the children about car design and how designers often use existing chassis to make designing easier. He showed them how to take the basic body shape of a car and change it to make more interesting shapes, and how designers have to take engineering requirements into account as well. The children had fun trying to design their own cars!

On another day, Sam talked about marketing and how designers think about branding and advertising. He showed us how to use shapes and archetypes to suggest certain qualities, and how to focus our messages on just one or two main concepts that could be expressed visually. He also talked about propositional density (how many visual concepts are being conveyed in an image—the goal is to have a high propositional density for maximum effect).

Sam gave us an assignment to design a logo that conveyed the message "Fast, but friendly" (or something like that...my memory of it is uncertain). It was really fun to attempt!

Rock Stand

The children, who are quite mercenary little creatures at the best of times, were driven to many new heights of enterprise during this Economics and Money Unit. I always try to discourage them from doing Lemonade Stands and so forth, mostly because it makes ME uncomfortable (I'm always afraid they'll annoy people, or that people will stop and buy something just to be nice but be sort of annoyed at the same time. Ha.) and because I never think they'll be very successful and I want to quash their little dreams early so as to prevent future disappointment. And I think, the thousands of children's books using Lemonade Stands as symbols of "Entrepreneurship" to the contrary, that children's lemonade stands don't actually add that much value to society. It's funny, because when I see OTHER children at lemonade stands I think it's darling and I even make a point of stopping at them when possible, but it's still something I sort of groan at whenever my children want to do it.

What value does this kitchen scale add to the world?

(Speaking of adding value, Sam actually taught a whole lesson about it during this unit. It's something he always tells his college classes about. He talked about adding value to the world, and how to do it [and how even if YOU think you ARE doing it just by existing or "creating," it's really determined by whether or not others WANT your goods or services. And he talked about different types of value, of course—our intrinsic value as children of God doesn't change].)

Well, in spite of this wet-blanket-ness on my  part, the children have sold things at "stands" before and probably will again. And this latest effort was a rock stand selling various rocks we have found or bought and polished. And I suppose the polished rocks actually are something the children added value to by polishing, so that's good. Though I didn't know if there would be much of a market for them. This Rock Stand was a multi-day effort and the children actually made a little bit of money! So they were thrilled.

The kids were very conscientious about marketing. They made many signs, and walked up and down the street yelling and ringing a bell. It probably drove our sainted neighbors crazy. I tried not to let it go on too long or too frequently.

I loved Malachi's sign. Good thing we have so many "raer" rocks for sale.

Sweet Daisy made the cutest little Activity Books with dot-to-dots and coloring pages and other fun things. They were so darling and she said, "My target audience is something like two- or three-year-olds." I said, "That's good, but your target audience doesn't have any money!" She said, "Well, their big brothers and sisters could buy them for them." Unfortunately, there were no big brothers or sisters of adequate generosity around, so she didn't sell any books. It was a little sad (and that's another reason I don't like it when my kids sell things). But, Daisy wasn't too disturbed by it. She had fun making them anyway!

Clothing and Identity; Costume Design

Throughout this unit, we talked a lot about clothing and identity: what clothing says about a person, what clothing doesn't say about a person, etc. That was one of the main things we wanted to convey to the children: that their clothing choices matter, but that dressing to fit in can also have drawbacks. And that wearing something that fits well and says what you want it to say—and wearing whatever you wear with confidence—is a lot more important than fitting in to someone else's arbitrary definition of "stylish." Sam and I felt like we would have been so much more empowered had we had that kind of perspective when we were young!

Sam taught a day on Costume Design, stressing how for costume designers, every clothing choice must reveal something about the character. We learn a lot more than we realize just by looking at how a character (or any person) is dressed!

Nutmeg was very happy while Sam was teaching. He kept hopping in circles around Sam's legs.

Finally Sam had to pet him.

Sam drew two character outlines and had the children draw in costumes to fit a specific character profile which he gave them. They had to justify how their clothing choices showed various aspects of that character's personality. It was fun to see what they came up with!

Malachi, Daisy, Malachi

Junie

Seb

Abe

Sam chose one of the designs (Malachi's) to paint over and make more realistic. I love how it turned out!

Bonsai Art

Sam teaches an Art Lesson to the children (and me) when he can on Fridays, so during this unit he taught a class using Bonsai as a vehicle for some fundamental art principles. He showed this video on fractals and then discussed areas of rest and areas of detail, line flow within a composition, etc. He had us draw bonsai using big shapes and try to make them interesting and dynamic with the shapes they chose. After they had their shapes drawn, he had them fill in the shapes using ink and paintbrushes. It was quite fun to do, because the ink was so satisfyingly wet and bold and black! :)

Our bonsai pictures.

For awesome pictures of bonsai (and instructions on how to grow and cultivate them, but that is way too big of a project for us right now!), we recommend this DK Publishing book: Bonsai. We loved looking through it. We just love bonsai in general! 

We liked this video about bonsai, and especially the teeny tiny MINI bonsai they show, no bigger than your thumb. The cutest! Daisy almost died of happiness.

We went to a store that sells bonsai (Cactus and Tropicals) so we could see some in person. We like them so much. If they didn't seem like so much work to keep alive and beautiful, I would definitely want some in our house!

Proportion Drawings

I asked Sam to give us a lesson on proportion, and how artists' understanding of it changed during the Renaissance. As usual, he gave an awesome lesson. One really interesting thing he showed us was this video comparing different styles of female figures in Western Art over 500 years. Fascinating to see how proportions and styles change over time!

Then Sam had the children draw, using our little bendy guy from IKEA. It was cool to see how much better their drawings got as they worked on using relationships (forearm:upper arm, torso:leg, etc.) to draw the figure.

The children also, for some reason, really really liked the part of the lesson where we had people stand up on the table and then measured to see how many "heads" tall they were. They wanted to do it again and again.

Daisy's drawing

Abe's drawing

I really like how Junie's drawing turned out. She worked really hard on it.

Ky's drawing

Seb's drawing (he added in shading as well). He spent a ton of time asking Sam, and erasing, and trying again, to get this right. The angle of the arms as they faced away from him was really tricky to draw, but I think he did a great job with it.

Game Design Final Projects

Here are the finished games from the Game Design Unit! The children were so pleased with their creations, and I was amazed at what they were able to accomplish! Abe's game, above, has you trying to climb up to the top of a pyramid using "rope" cards of various types. You can be helped or hindered by other players using "power" cards. He really thought the game out and made a lot of improvements throughout the process, and he was meticulous in his crafting of the game board and the game cards. I love the final result!

Abe's cute game pieces (made from baked polymer clay)

Daisy couldn't bear to be left out, so she made her own little "game" and game pieces. I love that little pink die! (In fact, I made that little pink die!) She and Junie had fun just rolling the die and moving around on the game board, no rules necessary. :)

Seb's game is a maze that has a different start and finish spot each time you play it. You collect treasure as you go through the maze. There are portals that can move you across the board in one jump, but you have to make sure you land on enough spaces to collect the available treasure. It's really fun! His written instructions are clear and concise too, which is no easy thing to accomplish. And I love the way his game board turned out. He had a vision of what he wanted it to look like and he did a great job realizing that vision!

Malachi's colorful game is so cute, and you never quite play it the same way twice. He worked so hard painting his game board and shaping his little game pieces, and thinking out the complicated backstory of the game! I love it.

I think my favorite part is seeing the children playing their games together and having such fun doing it. I hope they will have good memories of these times and that they will enjoy playing their games for many years to come!

Game Design Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

Sam didn't have to go to work during the week between Christmas and New Year's, and he'd been wanting to teach one of our units, so we happily took this opportunity! He decided to teach a unit on Game Design. He has been designing games for many years now, as he got his first job in the game industry at age 16! He works at Disney doing concept art now, but he stays quite involved with game design and he loves it. So, this was a perfect chance for him to share some of his knowledge with the rest of us. 

Sam had his own lesson plan for this unit, but I took notes as he talked and tried to fill in most of the things he talked about on my usual spreadsheet.

Ky pretends to be a jumping bean, moving from pillow to pillow

I thought it was really interesting how many aspects of designing games can be applied to designing . . . anything! The concepts of flexibility, usability, aesthetics, target audience, reinforcement, etc. seem like they will be really useful in a whole bunch of areas! And Sam is just a good teacher, so he could probably talk about practically anything and it would be interesting. :)

Sam had the boys each design a game for their Final Project, which they worked on throughout the week. They spent a LOT of time testing and re-working and refining the concepts, and Sam helped them think through potential problems and come up with better redesigns as they went. It was really cool to see what they came up with and how they improved their ideas. And the finished games actually turned out really fun. I think we will keep playing them for many years!

Some of Sam's teaching charts

Abe working on his game---before and after being shorn :)

First draft of Abe's instructions

Seb's prototype

Malachi's instructions

Game testing with Daddy (Seb was sick this day---you can see him sitting wanly on the heater vent in the background) :(

For their final games, the boys really worked hard to make nice, professional-looking (well, relatively speaking :)) products. Sam let them do all kinds of things that I'm usually too lazy to allow---things like painting their boards with craft paint and sculpting game pieces and dice out of Sculpey. They spent hours and hours getting everything just right.