During weekdays, my daughter and I got our routine going for our homeschooling. Come Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, it's all free day. Not that it's just a day for dilly dallying and lollygagging. It's the time of the week where we catch up on things we missed during the week that was. If we're too responsible during the school week and we don't have any backlogs, it's the time to catch up on some free reading, hobbies, movies, or out door activities.
For today, we felt like studying nature some more. I have successfully incorporated nature studying during our school week but one can never have too much education about nature. This time, I infused art with nature. I remember she got curious about how Jose Rizal painted using flowers and leaves. I told her I'm going to show her one day and this is the day.
We started with greens since we have lots of green and leafy plants. She loves the smell of oregano so she chose that for our trial run. We used her old mashing plate, the one I used for mashing her food when we first introduced solid food to her when she was still a baby. Looking at that brought me memories of when she was still very little. Man, children do grow up so fast.
After she have beaten the leaf into a pulp literally, she went ahead and tried painting with it. Needless to say she was impressed. I myself was impressed. I forgot how amazing these things are. When I was a kid I used to do these with gumamela flowers.
When she was done doing the trial painting, she went ahead and gathered more. I instructed her to pick flowers of different colors and leaves as well. She went downstairs with a tiny basket and went back with lots of flowers. She picked some bougainvillas, pink and orange, she also picked kamias flowers, some purplish flower I don't know what the name is, and some more green leaves.
I let her do all the process from mashing the flowers to pressing the mashed flowers to get the juice to the drawing and painting. While she was doing it, she couldn't help but give some side comments. One of her observations was that the plants did not smell good as she was mashing them. But they do look so pretty on paper, she said. There was one amazing discovery she found. Kamias flowers produce reddish juice, somewhat dark pink, but once it touches the paper and dries, it becomes lavender.
I did not know it would make that kind of reaction either. I guess we were both awed at the amazing beauty that is mother nature. Once she started mashing and painting, she couldn't stop. She wishes to go out some more, find other flowers she could juice so that she could see other magical things that might happen.
Our nature study today did not include any studying of scientific names, nor any forced enumeration of the parts of a flower. She just instinctively pointed out how different each flowers' pistils looked like on each flowers. Our nature study today was 90% fun and amazement. She also learned to love and appreciate Mother Nature's beauty even more.
