Amish Buggy Art

Trevor's classmate, Avery, loves to craft. She happily accepted our invitation to join us in doing the activities from the Little Passports Ohio State Journal (affiliate link). Ohio is Avery's home state, so it was really interesting to learn more about a state neither Trevor nor I have visited from someone who has lived there and has family throughout the state.

Avery had never seen Little Passports before, so Trevor was really excited to show her everything that comes in the monthly kit. She was impressed... and even more so when I told her that you get two states for only $12 a month! Once the kids had gone through all the items in the package and flipped through the pages of the Journal, they were ready for the art project called "Visiting Amish Country." 

The Journal teaches how to draw a horse and buggy in 8 steps, and provides a blank page for drawing it. Because two kids and a mom can't draw in one space, I thought it would be fun for the three of us to make the project out of construction paper rather than just sketching it. Here's mine:

Materials: construction paper (black, white, browns), pencil, scissors, glue, markers (brown, black)

We started by following steps 1-4 in the Journal to sketch the horse on brown construction paper. (I drew mine from the opposite side of the table so I could take photos of the kids; every once in a while, I had to zip around to the other side of the table to figure out a step!) We drew in the facial features, mane, tail and hooves with a brown marker. 

Then we sketched the buggy (minus the wheels) on the black construction paper using steps 4-8. We cut out the pieces, tore a strip of the other brown to use as a dirt road, then glued the road, horse, and buggy into place. We'd each sketched our items a different size, so the next step was an epic search for appropriately-sized circles for the wheels on each of our buggies. Trevor found a salt shaker that was just the right size for his. 

Once we'd drawn the wheels, we added the harness with the brown marker. Here's their finished artwork! Isn't it great?!

 

Trevor's:

Avery's:

We put our art aside and jumped into the Ohio science project, called "Make Your Own Whistle." I'll share it with you tomorrow.