Art

I am not what you would call, "Artsy". For art classes while I was in school, I just followed the instructions exactly and tried to get the work done and over with. I remember being criticized in 7th grade art class for my pencil drawing. The assignment was to do this pencil drawing of a photograph of our choosing. I chose a photograph of a cat from a cat calendar I had at home (seriously didn't care). This art teacher started trying to teach me how to do a better job on my drawing. I'm not criticizing her at all! She was just doing her job. However, I remember walking away from her thinking, "I'll never understand that."

While the subject of Art is a small one and not as important as all the other subjects, I still think it is important for children to tap into their creative side. I do recognize the benefits, so I want to incorporate this into our home school.

I have just had the most difficult time finding a good book to use to teach my children art. I bought a coloring book that had pictures to color of all the different "masterpieces" from all over the world. It also had a brief history with each picture. My son seemed to like that book and enjoyed coloring it. But I think he is like me when it comes to art. He doesn't like to venture out and be creative. He likes to color the picture exactly as the original. I keep telling him it would be okay if he colored that girls hair neon orange, whatever he wanted. Nope. He had to look at a picture of the original painting and color it exactly the same. I get that he doesn't want to do much decision making with the colors, he would rather just do what has been working for centuries.

I have bought other books since and sent them right back to Amazon after looking at them and thinking that either A - it looked completely DULL, and art should be fun, or B - the book would require some knowledge of art to even teach from it (and I just know the color wheel... mmm yeah that's about it).

I just wanted to share that I found a very simple and easy book to teach art from. (Click on the picture to go to product page on Amazon)

We've done the first two lessons and they are easy and the kids thought they were fun. The book is SO simple and lesson plans are laid out step-by-step with a list of required materials to the side. There are even fun pictures of examples of the art. It says it is for grades 1 - 6, and I totally think you could start the book over and do it over and over again and the kids could do something totally different each time. You'd have to be a complete idiot to not be able to teach art from this book, and I'm an art idiot.