So I decided to share it with you all here. Enjoy!

Art begs you to notice it.

Why? Because art is God’s way of saying hello.
So pay attention to poetry.
Pay attention to music.
Pay attention to paintings and sculptures and photo exhibits and ballets and plays.
Don’t let all this go unnoticed.

Your world is shouting out to you,
revealing something intrinsically glorious about itself.
Listen carefully.
Love art, the way art loves Life.

~Neale Donald Walsch

A bit about the book…

What we loved…
While the illustrations were quite unique, I also loved the way that the author used typesetting to help ‘illustrate’ certain passages. During a passage about “diving in tropical lagoons and rowing on blue-green seas”, Anholt typesets the words in curves that go around the fish in the picture behind the words to hint at the motion of swimming and waves. But, more than anything, it was the story itself that captured both my attention and the attention of my six year old. There’s just something fascinating to me personally about an artist creating a chapel in a new and different way.

Age appropriate…
While Kate enjoyed the story and illustrations, I’m not sure I’d recommend this book for children younger than 1st grade. The pictures are just different enough and the text just long enough to lose a small child’s attention. Definitely a great read for elementary schoolers, though.

From the book…

Matisse was delighted to see Monique again.
“You are all black and white,” he teased, “but I have found a way to be more colorful than ever! Look, I’ll show you… First I put on some music. Jazz is best. Now I shall paint some big sheets of paper… as BRIGHT as I can!”
Then with hands as quick as butterflies, Matisse cut a hundred dancing shapes, and soon they were pinned up on every wall of The Dream.

Check it out…
This book is only one of a series that Laurence Anholt has written about artists. He’s also written children’s books about Degas, DaVinci, Monet, Picasso, and Van Gogh. So, now, I’m off to our local library to see which other ones we can find to explore and enjoy!!

So, instead of living with the masses of piles everywhere, I started looking for ideas of what to do with it all to help contain it and keep it from taking over my entire house.  I came across several great suggestions like these:

• Put the artwork into a plastic box that fits under your child’s bed.  You can always add more to the box as it starts to build up again.  And, you can usually talk your child into culling through the pile that’s been in the box for a while in order to get more of the new stuff in.
• Get a clean pizza box to store artwork (even some 3D artwork will fit in these).  You can even have a box per child per calendar year stored away in a closet somewhere.
• Take digital pics of the faves and then recycle it all.  (Talk about NO clutter!!)
• Hang them in your playroom or child’s room from a clothes line/string.
• Then, there’s the ever-present refrigerator door.  (Can you find the door or handle behind all those brilliant crayon masterpieces?)

While these are all great solutions and work for some people, the problem I had with most of these was that the artwork was stored away somewhere that no one could see them on a daily basis.  Or, if they were on display, there was just TOO much volume of work to keep up with it all on ONE refrigerator door.

So, we decided to do something different.  I ran across an article about making a collage of your child’s artwork on a canvas and hanging it in their room.  And while the task of putting things on a canvas seemed a little daunting to me, I liked the general idea of being able to put MANY pieces of artwork together into one larger piece of art.

For Christmas, we bought Kate a simple, wood frame from IKEA.  We got the poster-sized frame so that we would have plenty of room to display LOTS of artwork.  And the great thing about this frame, besides how CHEAP it was, is that it uses plexiglass for the front instead of real glass.  SO nice for a little kid’s room where strange things happen to things that can break.

We took that frame, painted it her favorite color, pink, and then added several decorations to it to make it truly hers.  She loved getting to personalize it any way that she wanted to with little foam butterflies and wooden letters painted to match her room.  And I loved that the whole project, including frame, wooden letters, paint, and foam cut-outs cost less than $10.

Then we took her PILES of artwork and started culling through them all to determine which pieces we absolutely HAD to keep and which we could cut out just a special piece of, and which ones were truly recyclable.  (This process, by the way took at least an hour!  She comes from a long line of pack-rats, so it was inevitable that it would take forever.)

Once we had the ‘special’ pieces ready, we started to place them on the poster sized paper that was included in the frame.  We took special care to cut things out with fun edged scissors, label the things that needed it, and arranging them just right so that nothing was covered up that was really important.  Then, we glued it all down.  (Quick tip: using liquid glue tends to make the paper wrinkle and even make marker bleed, so we wound up changing to a glue stick half way through the project.)  When everything is glued in place, I have Kate take a marker and sign her name and date to the bottom of the collage.  I think this will be a fun way to not only keep her artwork from this age, but also get to see a piece of her handwriting, too.

Then, all that’s left to is pop it into the frame (might wait for the glue to dry first, though) and hang it where it can be admired by all.  We have Kate’s hung in her bedroom so that everyone visiting her can see all her special pictures.  It’s been a great way to personalize her room even more and she loves being able to show off all her artwork to her friends and grandparents.

UPDATE:  It’s been a few months since we did the original collage and there have been plenty more ‘special’ pieces of artwork generated in that time frame.  So, we bought a piece of posterboard, cut it to size and went about creating a new collage of the current artwork.  Once it was done and ready to pop in the frame, we just set the new collage on top of the old one in the frame, sandwiching the old collage between the new one and the backing of the frame, and voila!  a new collage for her wall with all her current artwork.

Makes me wonder what other gorgeous pictures she could get by purposefully blurring the image…

I’m not sure if Charlotte Mason would consider photography a ‘handicraft’, but I’m thinking that in this day and age it’s most definitely an art form!  And one that I want to encourage in my artist-of-a-daughter, too.

I emailed a friend of mine and we decided to take our kiddos today to check it out. We loved it! They gave us a tour of some of the larger rooms in the home and would stop in each one and have all the kiddos sit down on the floor. The docent then gave a brief piece of information about the room or something specific in the room and then read a children’s book that somehow fit. In the Dining Room, she read “Bear Wants More” about a bear that wakes up from hibernation and wants to eat more and more. In the Drawing Room, the docent read a book about 3 mice who painted (Get it? We were in the Drawing Room?! hee hee ). In the Ball Room, she pointed out some of the Masterson’s collection of Chinese porcelain from the 1700′s and then read a book called “The Empty Pot” about a little boy who was trying to become the new emporer of China.

They have several different docents that rotate each week, and they each have different books that they like to bring and read to the kids. My 5yo absolutely loved getting to hear stories in such a new and exciting place. My 3yo actually paid attention and enjoyed kicking off his flip flops to listen. While my 21mo didn’t exactly listen to the stories, she absolutely loved pointing at all the paintings and statues throughout the house. Obviously the age range of 4-8 is best suited to the tour, but they don’t limit it to that age group.

After the tour was over and all the kiddos hugged our docent, “Ms. Mary”, we went out into the back yard to see the beautiful pool and grounds. We wound up playing hide-n-seek in the shrubs of the side yard until we were too hot and sticky to stay any longer.

All in all, a wonderful experience, and one that Kate is anxious to repeat!