Visiting Monet's Garden

This week during our French adventure, we left Paris and headed over to Monet's Garden. 

There are two docents who run the early group but this summer Froggy seems to be blue and with the same docent.  This week though we started with the painting rather than the story. As an added bonus, children got to how some other patrons use the museum.  This artist was creating a reproduction of another Monet painting right next to their presentation.  It was a wonderful distraction. 

The main painting on our tour stop today was The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil.  The docent led the children in an exercise on truly observing in a very Charlotte Mason style in my opinion. All the children then got to share what they saw in the painting.

She also introduced them to Claude Monet himself and gave a brief biography.

Then it was storytime.  The book this week was an obvious pairing in The Magical Garden of Claude Monet.  I had checked this book out of the library and Froggy had read it previously so she was particularly engaged.

Then they got to make their own art using pastels. They were given a sketch of Monet's The Japanese Footbridge. 

And here is Froggy  with her finished artwork in front of Monet's painting.