Latin Can Be Artistic

Detail of T.J.'s Latin painting

We had allot of fun in our Latin lesson this week. Our vocabulary to master is father (pater), mother (mater), Sister (soror), and brother (frater). To begin the lesson I used these Montessori cards which I made at the beginning of the year. We did a few activities with them until I could see the boys were getting the vocabulary down. Then I pulled out some large drawing paper (11x17) and we drew and then painted a picture with those four elements in it....and allot more creativity too.

T.J.'s black and white sketch.

The first thing we did was to draw a pencil sketch of the father, mother, brother and sister and then put them into a setting. It was really cool to see these guys just fill up their paper with ideas. It was as if there wasn't room enough on this rather large space for them to get all the ideas out. They quickly drew the four required elements and then 'went to town' drawing houses, snakes, fish and stair cases etc. What a delight to see them drawing with such gusto.

Zak's black and white sketch

The spiral-like shapes on Zak's drawing are snakes. We had a snake adventure with some neighbor boys this week which I am assuming inspired the images of snakes in his and Max's pictures. The neighbor boys saw a tree snake going up a tree just outside of our house which is in the neighbor’s yard. They tried to shoot the snake out of the tree with a few shots from a gun which was loud enough to give all of us a good shock. Turns out the snake had bit a baby bird in a nest up in the tree and the neighbor boys had rescued the now half dead baby. It had a bite mark on it and some blood. The boys spent the afternoon hunting for the snake which got away in our yard, and my dh spent part of that time educating the boys on snake safety.

Max's black and white drawing.

After they did a pencil sketch they drew over the top of the pencil with black marker pens. Then we added some color with paint. We used water color and I think looking back I would not have them use the black marking pens since the black bled too much into the water colors and made the colors muddy. Lesson learned for next time.

T.J.'s finished painting.

Zak's finished painting

Max's finished painting.