Starry, starry night....

I've wanted to join Heather for Drawing with Children for many months now.  Alas, I've been so busy that I haven't had time to wrap my head around the lessons.  I'm pretty busy right now, and brain cells are at a premium.  I was ready to hand off art to another teacher when Kathleen recommended Meet the Masters, a scripted, online art program.

You have to understand something to get the real beauty of my decision.  When I was a young, upstart teacher in inner-city Memphis, I was a creative whiz kid.  My classroom was like a little Disneyland, and I almost always had fun, hands-on, whoop-dee-doo stuff going ALL.THE.TIME.

Then our school adopted a reading program that was SCRIPTED. 

I was not happy 'bout that, folks.

There was huffing.

There was puffing.

There were numerous comments about not needing a college degree if all they wanted me to do was read a script.

Trained monkeys, you know... yada, yada, yada....

Well, here I am 15 years later.  I'm older and slower.  The creativity of youth is making way for the exhaustion of middle age, and I happen to like reading a script now.  It hurts a lot less than thinking. 

This week Wilbur and I started our scripted lessons with Meet the Masters. 

Love it.  Love it.  Love it. 

The script isn't dry or insulting to the teacher.  It follows a nice slide-show of art, and afterwards, there are instructions on implementing the techniques of the master of the week.  All of which is very easy to implement for a much-too-busy homeschool mom like me. 

Our master this week was VanGogh, and here are our replications of his work, Starry Night.

Wilbur's Art

Dawn's Art
Kinda looks like a Tim Burton movie, doesn't it?!?

It ain't Disneyland but it's getting the job done, and that's better than wishing on a starry, starry night for some young, creative teacher to come and rescue me.  I'm too old for fairy godmothers.

Happy Teaching!
Dawn