When life gets busy in our homeschool, it’s tempting to let language arts, math, history, and science dominate the lesson plans. However, even on the busiest days I know I’ll have a mutiny on my hands if my kids don’t have a chance to get creative.
Sure, Teaching art appreciation in your homeschool is perfectly manageable. You can easily include art appreciation in your lesson plans, but beyond becoming familiar with famous pieces and artists, what can be done at home?
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Finding Art Resources Online
Obviously teaching art is a natural thing if you have artistic ability coursing through your veins. For the rest of us, the thought of teaching art can be intimidating. So where does that leave us? Are we stuck with macaroni art and crayons from here on out?
Thankfully, there are tons of homeschool parents and teachers who happily share their art lessons and projects; that’s a huge help! Hands down, my favorite online resource for homeschool art is Masterpiece Society Studio. This membership site does all the heavy lifting for you: drawing tutorials, lessons on art fundamentals, mixed media workshops, projects inspired by master artists, and more! If you want to meet all of your homeschool art needs in one place, I can’t recommend Masterpiece Society enough!
I’ve also gained plenty of great art inspiration from searching Pinterest and perusing the homeschool blogosphere. My Art Links for the Not-so Artsy Homeschool Parent post also has tons of great ideas for incorporating art into your homeschool days. The help is out there, I promise!
Art Lessons on DVD
Aside from piecing together lesson plans for your art adventures, what can you do? For us, we turn to art lessons lessons on DVD. Here are some of our favorites:
- See the Light – from elementary levels to high school, See the Light is a great choice for art curriculum. I love that they offer such a variety of options: art classes, specific projects, and Bible-themed projects. You can’t go wrong with See the Light.
- Mike’s Inspiration Station – This was our first exposure to DVD curriculum and it didn’t disappoint. There’s a huge variety of projects between the two DVD sets (2 volumes, 6 DVDs per volume).
- Home Art Studio – I was introduced to Home Art Studio through art co-op with our homeschool group. We have enjoyed working through it with our group and look forward to diving into our second semester of co-op.
There are two things worth noting about Home Art Studio, See the Light, and Mike’s Inspiration Station. One is that Home Art Studio is organized according to grade level and is completely secular. The second thing is that See the Light and Mike’s both contain Christian themes and tones. These two are also ungraded.
Art for the Fun of It
Projects and curriculum are great, but what about simply having fun with art? Where can you turn for that kind of help? Your local library is likely to have some help for you. The Boy has found great “how to draw” books ranging from comics to animals.
Now that I’ve got my library plug out of the way, let me be honest and say that we use the internet for this most of the time. If you haven’t explored these sites with your kids, you’ve got to give them a try!
- Art for Kids Hub – There’s no way to hide my bias here so I’m not even going to try. Art for Kids Hub is pretty much the greatest site ever. Seriously. The instruction provided by Rob and his family is so perfect and I love the fact that his kids are included in the videos. The projects are truly age appropriate and are so much fun because there’s such a range of choices. From “how to draw” videos of popular characters, animals and holiday items to actual art instruction and information on materials, this site is solid. (From personal experience, it’s quite fun for parents too. I, ahem, tested out the Elsa and Ana videos. You know, just to be sure they wouldn’t be too hard for The Boy to draw. Yeah, that’s it.)
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| Art for Kids Hub is mom-approved. |
- Cartoon Art Club – The Boy has also had some fun here before. There are several levels of instruction available and the step by step drawings make the drawings comfortable and set an achievable pace.
- Draw3D – Full disclosure here: this site has recently made big changes and is quite different than it was when we used it frequently. We were always able to access tons of videos for free in the past and The Boy had a great time with these lessons. He used to beg me for more time on this site! Well, it’s not so free these days. The great content is there, but at a price. It could still be something your kids would enjoy though. It’s certainly worth checking out the handful of free projects on there.
Clearly you can still incorporate art into your homeschool even if you’re not particularly artsy. Between curriculum, projects shared online, library resources, and some awesome websites, you can embrace art and have a great time together doing so.
*Grab some coffee and head on over to the other posts in my Adventures in Art Series:
Emily, thank you so much for the kind words. I'm so glad you found us, and that we can be part of your homeschooling. I love that YOU gave us a test 🙂 I have to admit you're a GREAT artist! Please tell The Boy and Prissy "Hi" from our family.
Thanks so much for stopping by! We really do love your site around here (all of us do) and we happily share it with our friends. Thanks for all you do! 🙂