Auguste Renoir and the New Notebook

This spring we have been taking a look at Auguste Renoir. The most famous painting he did was probably was the girl with the watering can, so I introduced this artist to the boys by having them do an art project with that painting. We did this fun technique with a Cezanne painting and it worked out so well I thought we would try it again with Renoir's Girl With the Watering Can.

Then we read a fun picture book entitled, The Girl With the Watering Can. We played several games of concentration with Renoir montesorri cards, and read the Smart About Art book About Him. Then we hunted through the You-tube files and found this fun video of him in his later years painting with arthritis deformed hands.

I started something new with Renoir that I hope will continue with all the other artists we study. I created a notebook art gallery. The idea came from this post. I loved her idea of keeping an ongoing gallery of all of the paintings the boys were learning. One day (I hope) they will be able to flip through it and recite all of the paintings by name that they have learned and share with others these beautiful works of art they have collected. It should make an impressive collection over the years.
With this great idea to begin with, I only had to make a few adjustments and we had ourselves a notebook gallery! The first adjustment was to use the notebook instead of the photo album. I had three white notebooks already. The second adjustment was to use plastic storage sleeves instead of photo album pages. I found these sleeves designed for storing coupons. Then, In publisher, I placed the image of the painting on one side and added some blanks to fill in on the other side. Then I printed them out onto cardstock and the boys put them into the sleeves how they liked. If  you already have the montesorri cards, buying sleeves to fit them could be a great way to start your notebook art gallery without having to create anything or print them out again.

Then slowly, maybe three cards at a time we looked up the date it was painted and filled in the other info on the card.

We haven't designed a cover for this notebook yet but as more artists are added we will. The fun part about this notebook is that you can add or take away the pages you want. This notebook may become our impressionist art gallery. Why not have one for each art period?

What I loved about using the notebook over the photo album was that we can insert our biography pages. Prior to creating the notebook art gallery I had no where to put this page once we had completed it. Now we do. We have already studied many impressionst artists, so perhaps as a review next year we will create cards for all the artist we have learned about so far and make this book a real work of art itself.