Crafts For Lazy Moms: Pointillism

I did my student teaching in an arts magnet school. I blame the experience for starting my prejudice against kids doing cutesy projects as "art". Kids are born artists, but they'll never develop their creativity if we just keep having them copy adult designed projects over and over.

But in addition to my philosophical problem with cutesy "art", I'm also lazy. I don't want to spend an hour cutting out construction paper shapes or prepping my dining room for kid painting time only to have the kids finish the project in 5 minutes.

Pointillism is a style of art, pioneered by Georges Seurat in the late 19th century, where artists use dots of paint to create one mass or object. Seurat and his contemporaries used two or more dots of different colors, dabbed adjacent to each other, to create other colors. That's an activity for real art teachers, not those of us trying to keep our kids entertained on long afternoons.

But we can take the basics of pointillism and have our kids make dot art; I've seen kids as young as 6 work on dot art for 2 hours. I've seen preschoolers work on dot art for 45 minutes. That's a good chunk of time for a rainy Saturday.

I suggest reading a picture book or two before the activity, but you don't have to. Your local library probably has some kids books on Seurat, but you can also get some good ones from Amazon:


(These are affiliate links. Please use them so I can make a buck. Literally.)

Pointillism Activity:

• Have kids do a pencil drawing on a half sheet of paper (if your kids are very patient, you can use a full sheet, if they are on the younger side use a quarter sheet).
• Emphasize that they should NOT color anything in. 
• Get out markers and show them how to make dots.
• Have them practice making dots on a piece of scrap paper.
• Then let them "color in" their pencil drawing by making dots with markers. (See my picture above for what it might look like).
• If you want to be less lazy, you can have them use paints and Q-tips to make the dots. 
• When everything is dry, have them erase the pencil drawing. 

There's an entire musical devoted to Seurat, so you can always waste a little more time letting the kids watch excerpts of it on YouTube:

Teaching Tuesday: Summer Notebook

You've seen the articles about how much knowledge your child will lose over the summer, haven't you? Maybe you've even gotten flyers from the local tutoring center, promising that your child can actually get smarter over the summer, if you just pay a lot of money and drag them to the center on a regular basis.

If your child is truly behind, as in reading below grade level or doing math below grade level, then by all means have him/her tutored this summer. Although I would ask local teachers if any of them tutor before I sent my kids to a center. But more on that another time.

Everyone else needs to take a breath.

Preventing the summer slack off does not take a lot of ton of time, money or effort. I promise.

1. You'll want to read to your kid every day. If your child is already a reader, this is the time to read them something a bit above their reading level, like the Chronicles of Narnia or A Wrinkle in Time . Use the occasion to build vocabulary (make sure they have a way to interrupt you politely to ask what a word means) and comprehension.

2. You'll want to do a little bit of math every day. With first and second graders, this can be as simple as addition and subtraction fact flashcards. Older kids can review multiplication and division facts or math vocabulary words. Another option is to incorporate math into your bedtime routine, with a book like Bedtime Math. 

The truth is, as long as your kid is doing something during the day besides staring at a television screen and a Wii controller, you can probably stop right there. Especially if they're going to camp or you're taking them to lots of enriching places. But if you insist on having them do more (which I do, it's how my kids earn Wii, Kindle and TV time during the summer), here are a few more ideas:

3. Make them read independently. Let them choose what - comic books, magazines (American Girl and National Geographic Kids are popular around here), movie tie-in books - as often as possible. If you have an extremely reluctant reader, make him/her earn screen time by reading independently. 

4. Create a summer notebook. You can, of course, just buy workbooks for your child's particular grade. But a notebook is more personalized for your child, probably more engaging and definitely cheaper. 

A composition notebook is fine. 

This is Hugmonkey's notebook from when we were stuck in Florida. 

Summer Notebook How-To:

1. Take a good look at the work your kid has done through the school year so you have an idea of what they can do independently.
2. Every Sunday, write directions on the top of 7, 14 or 21 pages (depending on whether you want the kiddo to do 1, 2 or 3 pages per day).
3. Ideas for directions*:

• Have them to write a certain number of sentences, paragraphs and/or pictures about experiences they've had during the week.
• Have them retell a story or chapter you read together the night before.
• Give them 5 to 10 math problems.
• Have them write sentences using and pictures of vocabulary words from the book you're reading together.
• Ask them to come up with 5 math word problems and then solve them.
• Have younger kids match uppercase with lowercase letters, numbers to amounts or shapes of different sizes.
• Have older kids read a newspaper or magazine article, then write down the 5 most important facts from it. 
• Have them come up with 5 things they are curious about and how they could learn about them.
• Encourage them to keep a record of books, comics, magazines and websites they've read during the week. 
• Have them write a letter to a book character or historical character. 
• Let them cut words out of magazines and then sort them into nouns, verbs and adjectives, or long vowels and short vowels, or words they recognize and words they don't. 
• Give them directions for drawing a particular picture (Draw a square. Draw a triangle on top of it. And so on. . .)
• Have them figure out how much coupons from the local paper would save you at the grocery store that week. 
• Have them list and/or draw pictures of their favorite TV shows, songs, books, movies, websites, friends, foods, outfits and places. You can extend it by having them explain why these are their favorites. 

4. Check the work as your kid finishes it or each night before bed. Praise lavishly, but don't be afraid to ask for more details or to help them fix mistakes. 

5. Stop worrying that your kid is falling behind. 

*I'll be doing more ideas for directions in a few weeks, so don't panic if you don't think this will be enough to get you through the summer.