While I’m not an artist and struggle at even drawing a straight line, I know how important it is to introduce art to my boys. Just because I struggle with art, doesn’t mean that one of my boys won’t love it. The problem for me has always been figuring out how to teach something that I don’t know a lot about. Recently we heard about ARTistic Pursuits Art Curriculum and were very intrigued.
ARTistic Pursuits
I’ll be honest … just the thought of bringing art into our homeschool was a tad overwhelming for me. That was until I discovered ARTistic Pursuits Inc. Their Early Elementary K-3 Book One is an introduction to the visual arts and has been pretty awesome!
The ARTistic Pursuits K-3 Book One is a complete art curriculum for Early Elementary. This spiral-bound book is laid out in a way that is very inviting to all ages. It has colorful illustrations, easy to understand art history and technique instructions. Having a total of 36 lessons make it a perfect fit for the school year.
The K-3 Book One is broken down into three sections:
What Artists Do:
This is the very first section in the K-3 Book One and includes fourteen lessons that involve drawing and painting. The student will learn about the different types of activities that artists engage in when making art, materials artists use and the different types of subjects that artist capture.
What Artists See:
This is the second section in the book and includes seven lessons. In this section, the student will learn about the different elements that artist use in two-dimensional and three-dimensional work.
Where We Find Art:
This is the final section in the K-3 Book One, and has fifteen lessons. This section of the books highlights caves, pyramids, cathedrals, etc. Your student will explore mural, pottery, clay and more.
You will also find four different materials lists at the front of the book. The list roughly consists of around twelve items and some you may already have on hand. I went through the list prior to beginning this program and was surprised that I had almost everything needed.
Overall Thoughts:
This program is nothing short of amazing! We have been using this program once a week for the past six weeks and have yet to find a lesson we didn’t love. My boys love learning not only about the art, but putting what they learned into motion.
The lessons, for the most part, take around five to ten minutes to complete, but there have been days that it’s been much longer. These lessons open up amazing conversations with my boys and I love that. After we wrap up the lesson, we then head on to the project. The time for the projects will vary in length. Some can take as little as twenty minutes, while others can take an hour or so. It all depends on the how much time the student wants to spend on that particular project, and how much detail they want to put into it.
My five-year-old loves to paint and draw and is very detailed oriented. He has enjoyed every activity that we’ve done so far. Not once has he said he couldn’t do something, which makes me happy. I think one reason he felt so confident in giving it a try, is that each project shows a student gallery (a picture of the craft created by another child).
My nine-year-old has really enjoyed this program as well and was itching to skip to a paper/scissor project. Since we were trying out the different section of the book, I agreed to let him skip forward for one project. The lesson was on form and the project was to create any four-legged animal using the steps shown. While he set out to create the dog that was pictured on the page, his end product was an elephant. He was very proud of it. We even had to get some twine to add a tail.
We have been very pleased with this program. My plan is to repeat parts of this book next year as some is going to fall in line with our history.
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