Its Been a While

Wow, its been a long time since I posted.  I've been busy, in the time since I posted last, my oldest has graduated and gotten married.  My younger two are still being homeschooled.  We did a couple of years of mostly doing homeschool on the computer, and in many ways it has met our needs.  However, I am desiring more involvement in the kids schooling, and I also think they will benefit from more books and hands on stuff and less screen time, so next year we are delving back into more "traditional" homeschooling, if there is such a thing.

One thing I've noticed with my kids is that they seem to resist "lessons", even if its something they are interested in.  Even trying to get them to do artistic things is often met with resistance.  However, I've stumbled recently on something that seems to remedy this.  Its called ICAD.  It stands for Index Card a Day and the idea is that you do something artistic with an index card every single day.  Well, I started the challenge for myself, because my perfectionist tendencies make me hesitant to experiment with my art supplies, but I've found it very freeing to be able to tell myself, "hey if you mess up, its just an index card, so it doesn't matter."  The challenge started June 1st, and runs to the end of July, I only found out about it the day before yesterday, so I've only done two cards so far:

004, a photo by Thrice Blessed on Flickr.

001, a photo by Thrice Blessed on Flickr.

Last night as I was doing my second index card, both kids wandered in, saw my paints, and just wanted to started painting too.  So they both created nice images, they didn't use index cards, but that's okay!  I'm starting to think of ways of to "sneak in" lessons, for me and them.  I could practice a technique, and explain what I'm doing and why, and if they wish they can try it too, if not they could do their own thing!.

This one was done by daughter Danielle:

This is another by Danielle, but she tells me its not finished yet.

This one was by my son, Samuel.