Work has continued on Iona's "Kings" project. We've been watching the BBC Schools video on "Tudors and Stuarts" (
this is the corresponding book), although Iona's not been too interested in it. We've also continued to read in her children's Bible about the kings of Israel, and as part of that I decided to make a model of King Solomon's temple with her. I'll post a photo of it on here when it's finished, but so far we've been painting a couple of boxes. It's been hard to find some good, thick, but cheap, gold paint, so we've currently given it a coat of brown, yellow and very thin gold mixed together.
These past few days spring really appears to have sprung, with sunny, almost warm days. That being so, I decided Iona and I should get outside to do some painting this afternoon. I'd tried getting her to start painting the "temple" a few days ago sat at her table in the house, but I can never really relax then, as after a few minutes of painting properly ahe invariably decides to enlarge her efforts to include decorating her surroundings! Sure enough, after Iona had been painting the "temple" and I had hung out the washing, I returned to her to find her hands were lovely and brown. However, with her in her oldest, paintiest clothes, and sat out on the lawn, I didn't need to worry, and could enjoy watching her experiment, firstly with her model, and then with 4 sheets of sugar paper. She used 4 different colours and 4 different brushes, and of course all of the brushes went into all of the paint pots. I expected the paint to end up a muddy brown, but, surprisingly, it made all sorts of rainbow patterns within the paint splodges. Iona is becoming more sophisticated when painting, trying, for example, the effect of stamping the sponge sideways onto the paper. She's been noticing the red noses around recently for Comic Relief (probably the subject of our next unit study), and having painted some red marks on one sheet declared they were red noses!
My last discovery this afternoon was that a bucket of very hot, soapy water outside the door is a godsend for washing brushes, paint pots, and little girls' hands before they go into the house and grab everything in sight.
