Science and Seurat

We have been studying plants in our science curriculum. This week, we studied the leaves and their function. As a part of that study we studied the artist Georges Seurat. How's that for 2 subjects in 1!

I pulled together information about Seurat. To be honest, while I know his famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, I knew very little about the artist and his style. It was quite interesting!

I pulled together some information and paintings for the kids to look at while we talked. We looked at a few on the computer because you can see the details much better there in some cases. If you are interested in seeing the information, I have uploaded my document here. That document also has all of the links I found useful in preparing for the lab, along with the sites I used to get the information.



We used Seurat to talk about plant leaves because leaves appear green, though they are not. Chloroplasts are green. If you put enough of them close enough together, the whole leaf will appear green. Much the same way as Seurat's dots of different color paint combine to make an image when looked at from a distance.



After we discussed Seurat and looked at his paintings, we tried our hand at creating pictures with dots!