Making Numbers

Creating dots and making numbers seem to be the images Paulina wants to create. Take a look!

Okay...so she still needs to work on painting the numbers the correct way...:-) This is interesting because she knows how to write most of them which she did not paint correctly. As you can see 'it's all a work in progress' so to speak. She is learning!

Qwirkle!

Have you ever played Qwirkle? It's the most facinating game for early learners. It is based on shapes and colours and I think it is the precursor to Scrabble where you begin with a series of shapes/colours of tiles and the next person must build upon them. It is a great start to the game of Scrabble when the children don't know how to spell very many words yet. Paulina is in Senior Kindergarten and is still learning words so this is a good introduction to what she might get great joy out of one day, Scrabble. But let's live in the moment. We play Qwirkle as a family and we enjoy good family time while playing board games such as this!

We value family time and think that the family unit is the basis from which the child learns his/her identity, shapes his/her own values, morals, sense of humour, and basic outlook on life. It's great fun! :-)

New Dimension to Drawing

Paulina has moved on to drawing houses and stick people with 5 fingers (count them... there are 5!:-) )

Here is an example of one of the pieces of art she has recently created. As you can see there is a sun, sky, grass and a rainbow....but also people, flowers, and the checkered (which shows the windows) orange school with a flag pole on the left.The additional piece of paper which is glued to the original picture has a sun (in orange marker) with a smiley face and people (also in orange marker making it hard to see) as well as a white snowman toward the bottom. There is a white piece of paper which has two ends that are glued to the back of the orange part which provides as the handle to hold onto. It's functional too! :-)  This makes it easier to carry.

Paulina's Artistic Progress

Paulina's drawing and painting has progressed from Junior Kindergarten throughout this summer. For example, this is a laminated placemat which Paulina created in JK using crayons.

This is a rainbow and grass with a sun and 'other' things indicated with the green, red, purple and yellow markings. It looks like the rainbow she painted using acrylics not too long ago.

Over the course of this summer since completing JK, Paulina has progressed from crayons to markers and  watercolour paintings. Take a look!

She began making many pictures of rainbows of all sorts of colours in a variety of orders, then she added green for the grass, flowers/plants, and blue for the sky above the rainbow. Then she added 'people' indicated by the smiles and unhappy facial expressions under the rainbow to show that some people are happy and others are sad.

The following pictures are of grass, plants, a cloud in the sky and the multicoloured spots of pointillism is the rainbow in a different form. She progressed here by adding the cloud and creating a different way of displaying a rainbow.

In the picture above, Paulina creates another of her 'infamous' rainbow pictures however, this time she adds stickers of butterflys and ladybugs to add dimension.

Paulina branches out into two directions: she creates animals using pointillism above. The animals she created are a duck (bottom), a banana (right) and a tomatoe (top). Below she experiements with many markers using colour and highlights it with stickers.

All the while Paulina has been dabbling with watercolour paints and has created a variety of very colourful paintings. Here are a couple:

This is one of Paulina's traditional outside pictures with a sun, sky, grass, flowers and people.

This is one of Paulina's creation of colours using watercolour paints which includes a sun!

The Canadian Dance Company in Action!!

What a 'Fanta-bulous' performance that the CDC (Canadian Dance Company) put on last weekend! It was the year end recital that the CDC produced and performed that could have blown the top off the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga, with the cutest of cute young ballerinas to the wildly wonderful acro-jazz-hip-hop and tap dancers. The absolutely amazing finale taken from the very popular, Mary Poppins musical was just jaw dropping as the dancers not only danced but sang along too! From the tap dancing chimney sweeper to the beautiful and witty Mary Poppins and all of the children in between, it made for a very moving and cheerful ending to a performance that showcased the wonderful talent of all of its performers. I was made a very proud parent to know that my daughter performed her part with pizzaz in this show!!

Adventures with Biking!

Paulina, my husband and I have been biking together for a year. 

This year my daughter began biking without her training wheels. Horray!

Learning to Ski!

Paulina learned to ski by example and by holding onto our poles. Take a look!

Visit to the ROM

My daughter and I went to the Royal Ontario Museum during March Break and we had a fantastic time looking at the dinosaur bones (T-Rex, Stegasaurus, Barosaurus among many others) and the newly featured fossil of the dinosaur eggs and fetus. This is something that Paulina made during our visit at the craft table. It's a Quetzal which is a rare bird from Maya. Paulina's favourite part of the visit was definitely the Bat Cave! It was absolutely terrific!

Mixing more colours

Here, Paulina learned that when she mixed red and white it created pink. She also wanted to use purple so when she mixed red and blue she got a very dark shade of purple that you will see on the far right which she wasn't happy with so she used the premade purple, dioxazine purple in the rainbow. From her prior learning experience she likes to make orange and green too.

This painting is entitled Rainbow with Sailboats. The image is a rainbow which is the arching lines with a sun in the top right corner and triangle shaped sails in white at the bottom left. The colours she used are Cadminum Yellow Middle, Phthalo Blue, Naphthol Crimson, Dioxazine Purple, and Titanium White. This is an acrylic painting on canvas.

Creative Art

Here is some art that my 4 year old daughter painted with acrylic paints on canvas. On the first painting she used primary colours plus green and the next one she mixed colours to make orange and the third painting she added purple.

 This painting is entitled Lollipop Land because there are so many lollipops in it. This is the first painting that she has ever painted using acrylics on canvas. She used only primary colours plus green to create this. The light green was created when she mixed the blue with the yellow.

 This is a painting of a Traffic Light - you can see the red light at the top with the yellow light below and the green underneath the yellow light. She mixed the red and yellow colours to come up with orange in this painting.

This is a painting of a rainbow in the city and a butterfly. The butterfly was created on the left with the two yellow wings with dots to decorate it and the rainbow is on the right.