Which is as it should be, considering that it’s a “cooperative” learning environment. Five of those previous classes were rambunctious, though, and at the end of the last session I was ready for a break. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to teach anything in the spring session.

Then the time to enter classes into the system arrived, and there weren’t enough classes to go around. So I tried to think of something that would be the very easy-peasiest thing for me to do. That’s when I remembered that MaryAnn Kohl’s “Great American Artists for Kids” was sitting on my bookshelf. And that’s how we added this to my homeschool co-op curriculum vitae:

Yesterday was the second co-op day for the spring, and I can say without a doubt that this has been my least stressful co-op experience so far. There are four 9- to 12-year-old girls in my class, and using Kohl’s book means all I have to do is gather the supplies and hand them over because the research part is already done.

I was very impressed with the kids’ work this week, and I thought you might like to see it. In fact, I’ll be sharing the results of our art class with you over the next 8 or so weeks. Let’s go!

John Singleton Copley & narrative drama.

Last week we started talking about John Singleton Copley. Copley was a well-regarded portraitist in his day, but the painting we focused on is what Kohl calls a “narrative drama,” or a picture that tells a story. “Watson and the Shark” is based on a shark attack that took place in 1749 in Havana. Fourteen-year-old Brook Watson was swimming in the harbor when the shark attacked him. It took three attempts to rescue him, and he lost a leg in the attack. He went on to become the mayor of London. Way to bounce back, Watson!

Anyway, we watched a National Gallery of Art video about “Watson and the Shark” and then did some brainstorming to think of thrilling tales that the kids could illustrate. They declined to use the ideas my fellow teacher and I offered up — bear attacks! volcanic eruptions! a bear fighting a volcano! — instead choosing to use a favorite book or their own imaginations for inspiration. They spent the rest of last week’s class sketching their exciting scenes, and yesterday they finished their sketches and added color using oil pastel crayons.

I think they did a bang-up job.

(Please send me any and all of our own narrative paintings, especially if they feature bears and volcanos.)