Pastel Pumpkins, Cave Art, and Black Widows

                                                       

I love the Daylight Savings time change in the Fall... not only did I get an extra hour of sleep on Sunday, but look at what I saw driving into the parking lot yesterday morning.

                    

I did not digitally enhance the color. It was about 6:50 a.m. as the early morning sunshine kissed the oak tree behind the playground. Orange leaves burned brilliant red. I lingered before walking into the building.

I learned this week several things.

One, first graders can learnto draw in soft pastel, and be pretty good with the medium. Consider the pumpkin pastel drawings below:

                                     

Yes, I did say they were first graders. The hardest part was not teaching them how to apply the pastel, nor how to blend with their finger, nor how to keep their hands off of the paper while they drew. As you can see, they did all of these things very well. They didn't have a problem with not blowing the dust off their paper once I explained to them why we shouldn't blow the dust off, nor wipe it off with their hands like we wipe off pencil erasures. No, they listened and followed all these instructions.

Rather, the difficulty lie in stopping when I said it was time to stop. Truly nothing pleases me more than to see them so involved in their drawing, in moving that color around on their paper, seeing the delight in their eyes as they stared at their pumpkin pictures. But with only minutes to spare before the next class is ready to file in, they need to stop when I say stop! All those chalky papers to pick up and put away, pastels to collect and put away, and more than 17 pairs of hands to clean up before they all line up at the door. For soft pastels, nothing is quicker nor more effective than wet Hand Wipes!

I also learned that 5th graders can draw pretty good with nothing more than a stick and some black tempera paint. The Cave Art drawings are coming along nicely. Yesterday the kids went "hunting"... that's what we called it, but what they really did was select from a pile of cards laying face down. On the cards were pictures of actual cave drawings. They were to copy the animal they 'hunted'. Later they will make up a story explaining how they (the cavemen) came to hunt their prey, and why they painted it on the cave wall. Cave Man Art Gallery coming soon!

                                     

I learned that Black Widow Spiders often have more than one red mark on the abdomen. In fact, many Black Widows aren't even black... they aren't black until they reach maturity. When they are young, they are white, they can be mottled grey and brown, they can have red spots across the top of their shiny round body.

                                                

The one I saw over the weekend was in my friend's yard. She found it while harvesting her little peanut garden (she's always trying something new. That gal has two green thumbs!) Fortunately it did not bite her. She knows of my interest in bugs, so she saved it for me in a jar. When I visited her Sunday (I was looking for a pumpkin leaf so I could draw a realistic pumpkin leaf for the pumpkin artists), her daughter showed me the shiny black spider.... the biggest I've ever seen. I took a picture of it through the glass. There were two red marks, one on the underbelly, and one near the spinneret.

I enlarged and color enhanced it to make the red spot near the spinneret more visible .                                     

                                                                              

Finally, I learned how peanuts grow, but I'll have to save that story for another day. It's late and I'm off to bed.

It's been a very good day.

Tags: blogplug, black widow spiders, harvesting peanuts, soft pastel drawing, cave man art gallery