Cave paintings on a Wednesday
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
cortneyandjon in arts & crafts, prehistory

Today turned out not to be for chores. Who needs clean laundry anyway? We're still doing swim lessons every Wednesday at the Goldfish Swim School on Wednesday mornings, something that Calvin loves, and while we're in town we tend to run errands. But when we came home we got right down to the serious stuff and created some cave paintings.

Cave paintings are mentioned in several of the videos we've watched on prehistoric human life, and we checked out a couple of books from our library, too—Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave, which was the best source we could find for pictures, and The First Painter, which was a fantastic story book with beautiful illustrations. So today we tried our own. Calvin collected items from the yard that would have been available to the original cave painters, busted out the washable red paint (which he called ochre for the duration of the project), and tried his hand (and fingers and pieces of nature) at painting a mammoth, a Megaloceros, and other designs he'd seen in the books.

It was a lot of fun. A little messy, and a lot of fun.

Article originally appeared on Cortney and Jon Ophoff's Family Site (http://www.theophoffs.com/).
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