In school W didn't love art. He was often too drawn in to the work and conversations around him. He'd miss the finer points of the directions or make mistakes, then get frustrated. He'd run out of time and rush and then dislike the finished products he brought home. I don't think he had bad art teachers; a busy classroom was just a harder environment for this learner to do art in. At home, while I have no qualifications in art instruction, I have been able to create a space and time for the art we do to be fun and without pressure, where I can coach him on taking his time, practicing, being patient with himself, and accepting mistakes as part of the process. I've come to see our art time as more valuable for the opportunity to work on those larger goal areas, than for the learning of new techniques or media or artists. I think he was disliking art and music in school because of the feelings and behaviors that came with those subjects, in school. Low-key art at home seems to be sort of therapeutic, helping him like it and gravitate to it more. "I LIKE this kind of art," he has told me. We both look forward to our little art exploration sessions. There is no direct teaching in the way we do art; in this area in particular we are learning together, usually both creating something. He gets pretty absorbed, whether it's making a mosaic or drawing battleships, and art sessions always seems to run extra long because I hate to interrupt the zone when he's in it.
At the start of the year I thought I'd make a plan for the scope and sequence of what we would study in art, the way I plan everything else. I researched online. I found a few different schools' fourth grade art curricula. None of them felt like something I could fully undertake. And I wanted W to have some choice of what we did in art, more than he could in some other subjects. My research did give me some art concepts and terms to keep in mind as reference points. But I never did come up with an ideal plan for the whole year. I've instead fallen into a pattern of planning art time week to week and often at the last minute. I tend to go with the flow, doing activities based on his interests or things that come up. We started this year with some fun activities to practice some elements of art in isolation and have expanded into various other projects.
Here are some of the things we've done so far in homeschool art:
1. We played with texture.
We drew three apples and gave each one a different texture by drawing different types of lines on it. I found a really useful, free web site of art lesson plans by a high school art teacher: https://juliannakunstler.com/index.php . It is full of focused little lessons for beginners on specific elements of art. The lessons weren't written for elementary school kids, but it works, and I've learned a lot, too, doing the exercises alongside him. This and the next two ideas came from that site.
2. We made wobbly lines that looked 3-D.
It was cool to see the effect and took a lot of patience.
3. We colored landscapes to create a particular mood.
We colored the same scene in various color schemes to give it different tones or feelings: sunny, spooky, sunset, cloudy, etc. (I got to do a couple of these sessions with both kids on days preschool was closed.)
4. We carved bars of soap.
This was inspired by a book we'd recently finished reading, The Tiger Rising, in which the main character whittles. I found a Metropolitan Museum of Art how-to video (https://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/video/metkids/metkids-create/create-a-soap-carving) and plenty of other online inspiration; turns out we aren't the only ones to ever carve a bar of Ivory soap! Naturally, W tried to carve a pug...
5. I taught him to knit.
I know this might not be technically considered art. I'm still so proud of him that he learned! This was two-handed coordination that can be pretty frustrating in the beginning. And while I was really excited to try to teach him, I wasn't sure he'd be able to do it-- motor-wise or frustration-wise. He knit the first few rows over several sittings and they were really lumpy and bumpy. After he had dropped and added many stitches accidentally, he wanted to start over. I was thrilled he wasn't giving up. He ripped the whole thing out and started over and continued till he'd made a whole scarf that got ever smoother as he went. During the whole project he kept asking me questions about my grandmother and how good knitter she was.
I consult with my husband a lot for ideas of what to do in art and how to do it. He was a fine arts minor and has some ideas about techniques that might help demystify art. He has pointed me to some good skills we could tackle, like perspective, which was inspired by a cool picture he took of our daughter on a trip to Washington, D.C. this fall:
7. We draw soldiers and battle scenes.
This is a special interest that has become apparent this fall. He's fascinated by wars. It has inspired him to want to work on some seriously challenging stuff like drawing people (soldiers) in action poses. We look up how-to videos or he tries to copy war scenes out of books he reads. I was trying to follow some of the drawing instructions with him in a soldier-drawing book he got for Christmas and found myself needing to work on my own growth mindset.
8. He made gifts.
For a few years, my kids have given homemade gifts of some sort to some family members for Christmas. This year W's ideas were more ambitious. It was nice that I had the time to help him see the ideas through. The gift making caused him to look into things like how to draw birds, which we would not have done except that he knew his grandmother liked birds so he wanted to make a mobile out of them. He worked on his gifts for weeks here and there, but we took an entire day in late December as gift-making day so he could finish all his projects. He was so excited to give them away.
9. We played Masterpiece.
This is not the most exhilarating of board games I realize now as an adult, but I liked playing it with my grandmother when I was a kid. You bid on, buy, and sell famous paintings, hoping not to obtain a value card stating "FORGERY" (similar to getting the old maid in a card game). It is mostly from this game that I learned to recognize the few paintings I can. I got the dusty box out of the attic recently and W really enjoyed it-- I think mostly because of getting to work with large sums of cash and the excitement of winning, but there was definitely some collateral memorizing of famous pieces and artists that happened too.
10. We discuss works of art connected to our other studies.
We are deep into a study of the American Revolution. It has been cool to look at some images of artworks online that shows the people or events or time we're reading about and discuss it as a piece of art as well as the historical significance. These are a few we've used:
George Washington portrait
Paul Revere portrait before the Revolution
Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre
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