The Art of Drawing Things Apart ...

We are having so much fun with our study of Leonard da Vinci.  Today, we learned how to draw an object from it's complete form and then take it apart and draw each part of it. We took apart a video cassette.

First, I taught the children how to draw a 3D rectangle.   That was more of an undertaking than I expected it to be.  Then the kids did their drawings of the video cassette.

Next, they took all the screws out and opened the case up.  Above is a photo of Goldilocks using a small screwdriver to open the case. As they took each new part out, they drew pictures of each item. They became very excited when they got to the video tape.

Once we had drawn all the parts, I was done with the lesson.  However, my kids were just getting started.  Insert the rabbit trails that make homeschooling so great!  They wanted to know how far the video tape would stretch.  They had already separated the two rolls by cutting them apart, so we decided to just learn about long distance measuring with one of the rolls, approximately half of the total length of tape.  We took the roll outside to stretch it.  To our amazement, it stretched a distance of four houses in a city block 3 times!!!!  To work out the math, the kids measured one sidewalk square and then multiplied that by how many squares the tape covered, multiplied three times more for it stretching three times over the distance. Since we crossed over 4 driveways, we meaured those, multiplied that total by three, and added that figure to our total as well.  There was a grand total of 798 ft of that portion of video tape!

I was proud of them for figuring out this math problem on their own.

The children then used the video tape for projects. They cut some into streamers to dance with, used some for crafts, and even got entangled in it, laughing hysterically.  As I've wondered so often, why do we even buy toys anyway?

Blessings,

Dawn