"The Usborne Introduction to Art"

Every year I add a small topic to the kids school day.  The first year we learned a bit about the States, then we focused on World Geography, last year we did Composers and this year I decided to focus on Artists.  I wanted a book that would begin with the earliest known art and end up with modern.  I also needed something that wasn't too technical as I just wanted to expose my children to various artists and styles of art.  And as always, I didn't want to pay an arm-and-a-leg.  After quite a bit of searching, I decided on The Usborne Introduction to Art.


First, I wrote up a schedule for a 36 week school year.  Each week my 2 oldest read the required pages.  Then I have them draw one artwork to the best of their abilities and color another piece.  For the coloring I purchased two books:  Masterpieces and Art Masterpieces to Color, but I think Color Me Masterpiece is a great site to find coloring pages for both paintings and sculptures.  And a bonus is it is free. Finally, they are required to write a short essay including the questions I listed on the schedule.

We have completed week 11 and so far the kids are enjoying learning about different artists.  Now and then they balk at drawing an intricate piece of artwork and so I allow them to focus on one area of the painting and they draw that instead.  One bonus is my child who HATES drawing, has improved dramatically in a short amount of time.  Why this is the case I am not sure, but seeing great artwork and learning about the artist may be contributing to the improvement of the drawings.

One last thing, if you decide to take a look at my schedule you will notice some of the artists or art periods are highlighted.  The reason for this is my children must choose a piece of artwork from the highlighted artist to draw or color.  If I didn't highlight a specific artist then they pick their favorite artist from the week's reading to draw or color.

My hope in writing this post is it will make it not only easier for you to expose your children to great art and artists, but by using my schedule it may save you some valuable time by not having to write your own.  One last thing, this is a fairly cheap way to teach art history as the Usborne book is fairly inexpensive and the coloring pages can be printed for free.  Thank you for taking a look.