Making a Picasso-inspired Guitar

To teach my son about Pablo Picasso, I decided not to focus on his role in the cubism movement, but rather on his remarkable painting The Old Guitarist. 

Since our last fine art lesson (on Van Gogh) taught us about the connection between color and emotion, this piece from Picasso's Blue Period was a nice segue.

To start, I gave my son a coloring page that I’d made based on the painting and asked him to follow the directions at the top of the page, considering what the man might be feeling/thinking and using colors to reflect that. (Download the coloring page I made here.)

Kids have THE best interpretations of art. My son thought the old man was thinking about his boy and imagining the two guitars he was going to make for him; that’s why his eyes were closed! The old man was excited about the project. I asked my son what color would show his excitement and he selected green.

When he was done coloring, we figured out how many years ago the original painting was made. Then, I showed him a print-out of Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, and shared the following:

• For three years between 1901 and 1904, Pablo Picasso used mostly blue in his paintings. I asked, “Why do you think he used so much blue?” He was sad.
• When a close friend of Pablo’s died, he painted LOTS of sad things like people who had no friends or money or were sick.
• The Old Guitarist is a painting of an old blind man who has no money.

Then, my son made his own guitar.

Here’s the supply list: an empty tissue box, a paper towel tube, brown postal mailing paper, six rubberbands, a small piece of cardboard, and six brads. I traced the sides of the box onto the brown paper and my son cut them out. Then we glued them to the box (1).

Next I cut out a circle at the top of the box where the guitar’s neck would be attached (2). I used a glue gun to apply glue on the circle’s edge and we wedged the tube tightly in the cut-out hole (3). Then my son cut two slits in the top of the tube opposite each other (4) and we slid a trapezoid-shaped flat piece of cardboard into the slits. I applied a little glue to hold it in place.

My son added six rubberbands to the base of the guitar (5) and slid the brads into the cardboard edges of the trapezoid top (6).

When the guitar was made, I showed my son the two pictures of The Old Guitarist – his and Picasso’s. I asked him what kind of music he thought the two men were playing (was it fast or slow?) and had my son play his instrument the way they might.

When we were done, my son didn’t put his new guitar down for a whole hour. He even held it while watching a movie we rented. Maybe I’ve got a budding musician on my hands!

Unlocking the Keys to Simple Addition

Math might come pretty easily to my son but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need the practice. There are two main principles that guided the creation of this activity; I wanted:

• to make a math game that could be changed with more difficult problems as my son’s proficiency grows.
• a way that he could check his answers independently.

The result was Lock-and-Key Math.

You need 4 supplies for this activity:

Cardstock (print my 4-page PDF on it)

Thirteen 3” x 4” toploading trading card sleeves

Lamination

dry-erase marker

Cut out the gray key silhouettes. Cut out each of the keys (yes, it’s a pain, but TOTALLY worth it). Take the keys to an office/copy shop to be laminated. Use thick lamination sheets and space the keys widely. Once laminated, line up the keys with each corresponding silhouette, using them as a guide for where to cut the lamination so the final result is a rectangle shape with the key floating inside it.

Put the silhouettes (or locks) inside the thirteen trading-card sleeves. Add addition problems to the keys with a fine-tip dry-erase marker. On the back of each key’s corresponding lock, write the answer on the sleeve with the marker.

Before my son played the Lock-and-Key Math game, we read Loreen Leedy’s Mission Addition. (I love Leedy’s books.) Because the book explains how to add numbers when they are stacked vertically (as opposed to 3 + 4 =), all the Lock-and-Key problems were written that way.

It’s time to play!

I put all the keys is a jumbled pile on the table and laid the locks face-down so the answers were visible. One by one my son picked a key, solved the addition problem, and found the sleeve with the answer. Then he flipped over the sleeve and slid the key into the lock. If he was right, the silhouette matched the key perfectly.

My son patiently and quietly worked through all 13 problems, matching each key to its respective lock. While I planned for him to play the game independently, I failed to consider how excited he’d be with each correct match!

Keyboard Codes (Spelling Practice with a Homemade Laptop)

My son LOVES the computer, so I’m constantly in search of great online (educational) games for him to play. When I saw Joyful Mama’s post on the felt laptop she made for her daughter, Sweatpea, it jumpstarted my creative juices.

Since we’re still working on spelling those word-wall words my son is bringing home from school (check out Roll & Write for some history on that), I thought a DIY laptop would be perfect!

I knew, though, that if I put a pretend laptop in front of my son and asked him to type the words he would lose interest quickly. To prevent that from happening, I created ciphers (each was a sight word from school) for him to decode using the keyboard. This was SO MUCH fun!

1. Make a DIY Laptop

Use a large flat, rectangular piece of corrugated cardboard (mine was the packaging that came with a 16x20 picture frame I bought recently). Score in the middle so you can fold your laptop. Cut the holes off of an 8 ½ x 11 plastic sheet protector. Use a glue gun to adhere the sleeve above the fold for your laptop’s monitor.

Download and print the keyboard I made (click here). Glue it to your cardboard laptop below the fold. If you want, draw a rectangle below the spacebar for a touchpad.

Next cut another piece of cardboard to make a kickstand to keep your laptop’s monitor from flopping over. Attach to the back of the “monitor” using a glue gun.

2. Read

I love to pair a great book with every activity, so for this one we read Doreen Cronin's Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. It's hilarious!

3. Help Your Child Decipher Keyboard Codes

Pages 2-4 of the keyboard download have sight-word keyboard codes. Give one of these pages to your child along with the laptop.

The two-digit codes are numerical with the first number indicating the row and the second number representing the number of keys in that row that a child will count (from the left). For example, if the code is 33, a child will count down three rows and over three keys; hence, the letter is D.

4. Have Them Type the Sight Words

This was a lot of word work for my son. Once he completed decoding all 12 words from the first worksheet, I told him to find one 2-letter, 3-letter, and 4-letter word and circle each. Then I slipped his completed keyboard codes paper into the monitor’s plastic sleeve and he typed each of those three words.

When this was done, my son had loads of fun playing with his new “toy.” Since I had all the supplies for this activity on hand, I have no doubt that this is the cheapest computer I will ever buy him.

Making a Syllable Drum

Have I shared how much I love activities that combine multiple disciplines?!? This activity is all about music and language arts.

There are two parts of this activity: 1) making a drum and 2) reading and banging out the beats (aka syllables) on the instrument we'd crafted.

The drum can be made out of any recycled cylinder - the sturdier the better (I used an empty raisin container). Cut a piece of paper to fit around the drum’s exterior and ask your child to decorate it however they like. Use double-sided tape to attach.

Then cut two circles from any non-fraying material (I used vinyl leftover from a cowboy vest I made for Halloween a few years ago). The circles should be about ¾-inch wider all the way around your cylinder. We used a small bowl to trace the circle shape before cutting it out.

Use a paper punch to make holes in the circles about a ¼-inch in from the edge, roughly 1 ½ inches apart. Make sure both circles have the same number of punched holes.

Place one circle right-side down on the table. Add a bead of hot glue around the edge of the cylinder to hold it in place. Put the cylinder on top and add glue to the top of the cylinder, placing the other fabric circle over it. Now use a ridiculously long piece of yarn or other string to thread up and down through the holes, working your way around the drum. When you get back to where you began, tie the strings together. (NOTE: We neglected to use glue and our circles were constantly slipping as we threaded the yarn.)

With our drum made, it was time to read. Steve Webb’s Tanka Tanka Skunk is an awesome book for teaching syllables. An Amazon.com reviewer shared this little nugget and you know what? They were right.

Two lovable characters (Tanka, the elephant, and Skunka, the skunk) bang on their drums, drumming the beats of animal words (e.g. kan-ga-roo has 3 beats and cat-er-pil-lar has 4 beats). As I read the book, my son banged out the beats of the animal names on his new drum.

When he got confused (for example, trying to make fox into two beats), I reminded him that each syllable has just one vowel sound. Since there is only one vowel sound in fox, it has only one beat, or syllable.

This was SO MUCH fun! When he finished Webb’s book, he practiced lots of other words like the names of EVERYONE in our family and his teacher's name too. Then he asked if he could wear the drum; I tied a long ribbon around it so he could sling it over his shoulder and drum all over the house. My little drummer boy is learning syllables and drumming up some funky beats at the same time!

Now that’s music to my ears!

DIY Checkers (with Addition and Subtraction)

When my son’s math summer camp ended, the teacher told me about the games they had played in class. Games? Really? He showed me the games and explained how each of them taught math skills – even strategy. I had no idea that chess was a math game, but apparently it is.

Since neither my husband nor I know how to play chess or, truthfully, really want to learn, I thought checkers might be a more agreeable game for our family. To prove that playing checkers truly was educational, I did what every person does when they have an unanswered question – I Googled it.

According to Misty Karam on LoveToKnow.com, checkers can teach important pre-math skills like sorting by color, directions (e.g. forward, backward, and diagonal), cause/effect, logical thinking, and reasoning. Cool, huh?

What you need:

1. 24 plastic bottle caps (or 12 of one kind, and 12 of another; it helps if the lids will nest inside one another when stacked)
2. Plain colored cardstock in two colors (if you plan to add math problems to your checkers board, make sure one of the papers is a light enough color that dry-erase ink will be legible)
3. 1 sheet of posterboard measuring 14-inches square (or larger)
4. 1 sheet of sticker paper (optional) or stickers
5. Dry-Erase markers (optional, if you laminate your board)

To make our checkers board, I used my Fiskars paper cutter and cut out 32 squares (measuring 1 ¾-inches) in one color paper and 32 squares of the same size from another color of paper. Then one by one my son and I glued these down, alternating the colors, onto a 14-inch square piece of posterboard. (You’ll end up with an 8 by 8 grid of squares.) Then I took the “board” to a local office paper/copy shop to be laminated.

Since I had plans to work some addition and subtraction practice into our checkers game, I designed circular plus and minus stickers to print on sticker paper and cut them out with my Martha Stewart Punch All Over the Page™ 1 ½-inch circle punch. These fit perfectly on the 24 plastic Gatorade bottle lids I’d saved during the summer. (You can download my lid stickers here. Truthfully, though, you don’t need these stickers or a fancy punch. Simply add 12 of the same stickers to the tops of half the lids so that you can distinguish between the two opponents’ checkers.)

Before we started to play, I added some subtraction and addition problems with a dry-erase marker to the game board on colored squares we’d be playing on (on our board, we play on the gray squares). Every time that my son jumped one of my checkers, he had to answer the math problem underneath. (Need a refresher on how to play checkers? I did. Go here.)

My son has played this game every day since we made it. He even wrote and illustrated his own checkers rule book (his own idea!). The kid is going crazy for this game, which makes saving the lids and gluing all those squares totally worth it in my book!