Petrykivka folk art

If you did read my previous post "Decoupage - what is that?" you know about my first and I think my last one...Maybe I my napkins were no so good, maybe paintbrushes, maybe glue wasn't good enough.....Finally I decided just copy the pattern from the napkin and got that box with the blue-purple  flower.

Ok, I did it but I had in my head to introduce my children something very special not just painting flowers on the box.(Why on the box?because the little girl from my class once brought a few bracelets and  necklaces and we were talking  how she should keep them usually;.that is why we started with boxes) So I started to look for some special arts which were combine with flowers and leaves and were easy enough to make it for my grade 1 student. The first thing which came to my mind was Zhostovo painting. You can learn more about it here. It was gorgeous but I thought it will be hard for young children and I couldn't find any tutorial with print outs how to do that. Suddenly I found this blog where in humorous manner Owner is talking about her first try to do Petrykivka art.

That was insight!

"Petrykivka Style of Painting is a characteristic feature of Ukrainian decorative folk art that has been practiced for generations in the village of Petrykivka in the Dnipropetrovsk region."The art of "Petrykivka" or “Petrikovka” is an 18th century stylized form of painting floral and plant motives. “Petrykivka Style of Painting” is a remarkable artistic phenomenon of Ukrainian culture, and a characteristic feature of Ukrainian decorative folk art. 

So we started to learn how to do Petrykivka painting. For my luck I found in internet this blog and trust me I was excited in the same way as my children!
We also got great inspiration from this video

So, we started!

We started with "Pen test"))

We tied "light" touch and  "press" touch of our paint brushes. We tried to make a thin lines and thick lines. We tried to combine thin lines with thick lines and finally we started to make a petals! WOOO-HOOO!

Michelle:" My lines look like a rain drops! I am painting rain!"

That was very good observation!

While children were practising to make different lines I made my firs Petrykivka painting. In memories of Zhostov painting I didn't use white plate, I coloured a styrol foam plate in red.

We were so excited and started to prepare plates right now! while plates were drying children created own designs. 

 Finally!!! Some children felt ready to do their masterpieces!!!

Masha is painting her jewellery box. 

Shima prepares her wooden box with silver paint.

I printed a couple pictures with "Petrykivka" painting and we explored how Artist was painting those flowers and birds. We discovered every touch of Master and learn how to create flowers and ornaments.

Our first masterpieces!

This project took almost 4 weeks and we still continue to work on it. Many children who wasn't interesting in painting before join as in process and even older children such as Grade 3-4 were observing my Grades 1 and ask to join our team. Everyone is welcome! 

That how it was looking on our Art show

I badly want to share this post here

Decoupage - what is that?

Many times i got an idea to try "decoupage" technique. Never happened... This time I started to do it with my children but before, as usually , I tried it by myself.You can get a lot of information from internet about decoupage. So, there is no secret, is it? Two hours spent to make a decoupage box... I can say from my experience that it is much easier to take a paintbrush with acrylic paint and just draw it!

This is my decoupage experience

There is another try to make a decoupage box.....that was shoe box which i painted green to make it easier combine with my napkin...Finally I took acrylic paint and fixed refine the picture with ....

                                               And this is painting on the carton board box

It should be the present for Mother's Day.

I present these boxes  here

Nursery Rhymes

It was time to learn something more special about English Nursery rhymes!
I like this wonderful book"Mother Goose" with beautiful old fashion pictures

My favourite are"Peter-Peter", "Humpty-Dumpty" "Mary- Mary" and more others. This time was special rainy day.... 

Usually we read  the book by children choice, and children choose rhyme randomly and should guess what kind of Rhyme is that. Look on our picture and guess!

There were some more staff in our bag such as pumpkin, umbrella, flowers...

We decided to talk about rain, because that was hard rainy day !

That is how rain drops look like))

 Now we try to open umbrella...

...make a rainbow...

...and create our rain picture!!!!

Yes, there were some more activities and we really were having fun by making rain and wearing rain staff!

  You also can check more Spring creative here

Two pop-up cards for Mother's day

It is absolutely gorgeous two pop-up cards for Mommy's Day. You can find more tutorials how to make them in internet; but I just want to say: it is easy enough even for little children 5-7 years but the card s are beautiful. Activity develops such skills as using scissors, patience. The only one thing which I would like to add to any tutorial and which makes activity easier for little children - we were using template to get same flowers: children were tracing this template on folded paper and cut of them.
There are our cards:

 Unfortunately we did not take any picture of our cards with seven flowers but it was kind of that))

Picture takes from here

and here

And those my favourite here

Happy Mother's day!!! 

Find more here