Have you ever wondered how homeschool parents are supposed to teach art at home? Let’s get real: most of us aren’t artists and by default it’s tempting to sweep this subject under the rug.
The good news is that you don’t have to pretend art doesn’t exist. If you’ve never tried incorporating art into your homeschool, you may be surprised how easy it can be.
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The Boy has always loved drawing and painting. I knew art had to be more than just a paint-by-number project here and there, but for a while there I just wasn’t sure how to introduce it. Finally, while preparing for some down time between first and second grades, we decided to spend an entire summer exploring famous artists.
(Shockingly enough, this all happened in my PP (pre-Pinterest) days. Apparently I could function without Pinterest at some point in my life!)
We started by borrowing tons of library books from Mike Venezia’s Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists series. Forgive my mom-brain, but I can’t remember exactly who we studied. I remember Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Monet, Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, and Andy Warhol for sure, but there could’ve been a couple more. That series is incredible! The books are a perfect balance of biographical information and art.
We read one of these books a week and would sometimes add extra activities I found online. That usually happened when The Boy came across artists he particularly liked. (Notebooking pages would’ve been great to use with this series, but The Boy was only 6 at the time.) After reading through the series, The Boy selected a few favorite pieces and created his own versions of the masterpieces
We wrapped up our summer of art by visiting our local art museum and fell in love with that place! We were blown away by how kid-friendly it was. The Birmingham Museum of Art is definitely one of the things I miss about living in Birmingham.
Finishing at the museum was a great way to take what we had learned over the summer and use it to explore even more. By this point, The Boy was familiar with quite a few famous artists and some of the styles associated with them. It was great to walk through with him and see him connecting artists, exhibits, and styles with what he learned earlier in the summer.
You can see why art appreciation is a good place to start. I promise that you don’t have to be an artist, an expert, or anything spectacular to make it happen! It’s just a matter of doing it.
See the rest of the series here:
