A. A. Milne: Winnie the Pooh

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, 
"what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
"It's the same thing," he said.  
 

Blake-age 3

 A. A. Milne is the creator of the beloved tales of Winnie the Pooh and a few collections of children's poetry.  Milne's style is definitely unique and my boys are loving it.  "Oh bother!" my oldest son mumbled when his paper ripped while completing a math assignment the other day.  And Ernest Shepard's delightful illustrations have always inspired me.  Accept no substitutes for his originals.

We've been reading chapters of Winnie-the-Pooh  for a few days now and today we decided to try out Shepard's illustration technique for ourselves.  As with the boys' John James Audubon paintings, I sketched out an image they selected from our reading onto heavy watercolor paper (it really is worth the extra buck or two for paper that doesn't warp).  Of course, for other art projects I want my boys to be creative and sketch out their own ideas but for today's lesson I wanted them to focus on the application of the watercolors. We discussed two main concepts of watercolor painting. First we talked about wetting the paper and dabbing on color to watch it spread to create a soft background.   Then I showed them how to gently hold the brush to allow for more control as they painted the characters.  They noticed that when they pressed harder the bristles spread out and it was harder to keep the colors where they wanted them.

Logan-age 5

My five year old practiced mixing colors on the paper.  I should note that we used watercolors from a tube; much better for getting rich colors in a better variety.

I considered having the boys go back over their paintings with thin black ink lines. I really should if I want them to really experience watercolor and ink...we'll see if we brave that or not. 

I wanted my boys to have a little background information about Milne's writing and I found just what I was looking for at this site.  I read through it and paraphrased the information my boys would be interested in. We learned that Winnie was a real bear at the London Zoo and Christopher fed her condensed milk on a spoon and that she was originally a military mascot.  I printed off some pictures, which my boys then pasted to notebooking pages. My oldest copied out a caption and my youngest dictated his to me and I wrote it out for him.  You can find some nice free notebooking templates at Notebookingpages.com.

I found these nice pages for copywork at Home School Launch.  My 5 year-old is copying a page a day for his writing practice and should end up with a nice little notebook by the time we finish our unit.

 We've been sick at our house so we enjoyed reading "Sneezles" from Milne's When We Were Six.  This collection of poetry is available for viewing online for free through the Rosetta Project, though I think I may pick up a copy at the bookstore for more convenient reading.  Don't forget to read the introduction; it's hilarious.  Milne's When We Were Very Young is another great collection of children's poems.  To celebrate Milne's poetry, I put cards with various ending blends (-old, -ish, -uch, -oth, etc.)  into an old Winnie the Pooh box.  The boys draw out a card and create 3 sets of the ending sound with our moveable alphabet.  They can then choose beginning sounds to create rhyming words.  Or we do as we did today and sit in a circle and take turns drawing out a card and calling out all the words we can think of that end in that sound.

When I was in junior high I was really into Classic Pooh. I pulled a rug, a pillow and a throw I have kept from those days together, along with a stuffed piglet and pooh, to create our own "thoughtful spot" for reading.

We watched this fun video about how honey is made and since then we've been making peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Another favorite treat right now are the Winnie the Pooh animal crackers from Costco.  I plan to have a Pooh Party, like the one Christopher Robin gives for Pooh, complete with "those little cake things with pink sugar icing" that Pooh asks for in the book.  But more on that as we continue our study.