Loupe Looking

We just finished up our first week of school and the children had a great time! One special activity for the first day of school was Loupe Looking. This tied in with our artist of the month for September, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. We began by looking at the shapes, colors, and textures of fruits & vegetables.

After looking closely at everything, we created a series of analogies and then wrote a collaborative poem.

What else does it look like? What else does it remind you of?

This activity is from from The Private Eye Looking/Thinking by Analogy: A Guide to Developing the Interdisciplinary Mind by Kerry Ruef.

we start by looking closely at our own skin

Our collaborative poem! Can you figure out which fruit or vegetable these analogies are describing?

peels like your skin
veins
painful memories

round like the sun
yellow ribbons of sunbeams and wood grain
fragile tissue paper
shiny, delicate and light
it’s strong one way but not the other

layers of the earth
the inside of a wigwam

crunchy munchy
boba pearls
spicy-bitter smell
cluster of brown grass, the hue of Autumn leaves
roots going down into the earth

the color of worms
the potato’s neighbor

the inside is Spring leaves
green white watermelon-shiny
layers of the earth
levees protect the river


What am I?

If you guessed onion, you are correct!

The children were really excited to see these green white lines that were on both the onion and the watermelon. I never noticed that before myself!

Here's the link to the loupes we used: The Private Eye Loupe-on-a-Lanyard.

Our next activity for close looking at fruits & veggies is papermaking! I'm so excited to use the recipes in The Gourmet Paper Maker by Ellaraine Lockie.

The kitchen scraps that most interest the children are

cornhusks
onion & garlic skins
banana peels
citrus peels
pumpkin shells
artichoke leaves

Zac pointed out that Schnucks always has a big trash can in the produce section where people can shuck their corn right there in the store before they buy it. He thought we might be able to get them for free.

So a few days ago we went to Schnucks and asked for the bag of cornhusks, and they gave it to us with no problem. The man in the produce section said that that big trash can fills up completely with cornhusks twice a day!

We also got a donation of two big bunches of bananas. Guess I'm peeling and freezing bananas (and their peels) today!

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