Artventure review

Artventure is an online art tutorial hub for kids. I hesitated before buying this. Art with my kids tends to end like this, and this was only the beginning of the mess:

I vowed to never ever do art with them again. Well at least nothing that involved any mess making chances. They were limited to coloured pencils and on extremely rare occassions crayons and textas.

Although Texta's normally end like this:

So now that you can see my hesitation. I can tell you how much I LOVE artventure and LOVE watercolour paints.

The lessons are simple and very well explained. The kids love following them and then placing their own mark on their artwork. I love that you can search by difficulty, grade and subject, although I cannot seem to work out how to filter all 3 at once.

They are asking every day to do another lesson.

I think the tutorial is keeping them engaged so their little creative sensory seeking minds don't begin to wander into areas they shouldn't. Clean up was a simple tip out the bowls of water and a quick wipe of the table.

I am so pleased I took out this subscription.  I wish she told us where to buy cheap paper and paint. And it would be nice to use a few different mediums (but never ever glitter).

If you like me hate art, and have no fantastic skills at it. Artventure is a fantastic way to introduce your kids to creating amazing art works.

Below are two created by Mr I, this last week.

New Shelves = new learning

Finally bought some shelves and made some space for them. Firstly the shelves suck. I will be selling them off cheap as soon as I find something better. But they will do for now. The two little ones loved their first morning of Montessori.

Today we had 5 trays for them to pick from:

• Pom Poms, with tweezers and muffin tin. They didn't need instruction they just naturally sorted them by colour.
• Padlocks and egg rings. I linked a bunch of egg rings together with padlocks and let them have fun finding the right key to release the rings. Then they paddlocked them all together again.
• Math tray, this had a hint of waldorf to it, with our little addition gnomes.
• Stereognostic bag. Not a complete bag and completely DIY. ie I grabbed some of the kids wooden blocks to use.
• Pink series beginning sound cards. This tray was just for Mr 4.

This kids seemed to really love having all these things to do. Now to keep it going and interesting enough.

The week that just wasn't

This mumma was feeling over worked, over stretched, over tired and just plain stressed. Miss A is teething, Miss I is turning into a threenager, Mr I and Mr N are just all over the shop with the weather changing weather sending their sensory processing disorder into major disorder.

So I thought stuff this, lets just play and read and only do 'school' when they ask. We didn't do much and I don't care. I decided right I will read and crochet. The book is death boring and I completely cocked up my beanie. Completely miscalculated how much space dreads need. I thought I was going to have a beanie to show you all at the end of this week. We didn't school but it's ok I made this awesome beanie and I feel better about myself, I feel good that I have accomplished something for me and spent time on an interest of my own.

No instead I have this to show for my week....

 

I was almost going to have to write that my week ended as it started. Me feeling completely overwhelmed by life. But we went off on an excursion yesterday and it gave us all a chance to reconnect, giggle and chill out a bit. I ran away this morning to shop along (exciting things like bread and padlocks). So we are all feeling much better and hopefully next week is a good one.