This week we finished our lessons about Edgar Degas by exploring tinting and movement.  We had talked previously about how his paintings show a lot of movement and they tried to make paintings that showed movement. 

 

This week we talked about tinting and how to make different shades of the same color.  Then the boys glued a silhouette of a football player onto the middle of their page and painted circles around him getting lighter as they got closer to him.  Adelaide just painted what she felt like painting.

Austin chose orange for his tint color.

Gavin chose blue for his tint color.

While we waited for the paint to dry, we decided to continue our exploration of Canada by making Canadian Maple Cookies.  Dessert tends to be our favorite exploration activity for each country!  Gavin is chewing gum which is why he has a weird face in every picture.

Here are the boys final paintings.

And Adelaide's masterpiece.

And here are our cookies.  They were suitably delicious!  You can see someone's already been into them even though they were still cooling...

 

We continued learning about the brain this week focusing on the different parts of the brain and what area controls what activities.  We took turns doing this Stroop Test I found on TheCraftyClassroom.com.  You are supposed to say the color not read the word.  It was harder than it first appeared.

We also made these brain hats that show the different parts of the brain.  I found these on Pinterest but I can't remember what the website was were you can print them off.  Austin has his brain on backwards!

Austin and Adelaide worked on a Halloween painting this week.  First they painted their pumpkins.

Then, when the paintings were try, they added the face with construction paper pieces.

This was the final result...

Halloween was a little different this year because Gavin was at a soccer tournament out of town.  I took Austin and Adelaide to a church Halloween party instead of trick or treating.  The nice thing about the Royals being in the World Series and having a game on Halloween was that the streets were empty by 7:00, whereas normally we have trick or treaters until 8:30 or so. 

 

The first thing the kids asked me in the morning when they got up was, "It's Halloween today, right?".  Both of them were already in their costumes and they wore them all day, even when we ran errands.  They looked very cute together.  We did discover that hoop skirts and car seats mix like oil and water.  We also discovered that while hoop skirts look very graceful while you are walking calmly along, they aren't too practical for anything else.

Here's a few pictures from the church party.  They had a bunch of games set up and a big obstacle course bounce house.  Adelaide refused to play any of the games.  Apparently playing games is beneath a princess.  Austin had no such scruples and played them all.  The older gentlemen really liked his Navy uniform.