Simple lessons on teaching the grammer of art.
Welcome!
My name is Anna and I am a previous art teacher and current homeschooling mom.
I’ve created this blog to share art lessons that correlate to the Classical Conversations curriculum and to also give parents simple ways to teach art concepts beyond their CC community day experience. I hope it helps you!
I also publish a series of videos called Mealtime Monets that offer art lessons corresponding to Classical Conversations fine arts curriculum. -Anna
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Cycle 1 Week 13- Giotto
Get a box handy, ’cause you’re going to be packing in a lot of stuff for this project. It’s a super fun activity and totally worth the extra prep time and supplies! Giotto di Bondone was an Italian painter and architect during the late Middle Ages. He created beautiful frescoes and also did tempera paintings…
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Cycle 1 Week 6- Chinese Kites
To complete the first six weeks of Cycle 1 we’ll be drawing Chinese kites. The lesson plan touches on mirror-image drawing, one-point perspective, and abstract design. That’s a lot, but I hope the kids feel confident in their knowledge and enjoy drawing their final piece. Many historians believe that China is the birthplace of the…
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Cycle 1 Week 5- Japanese Pagoda
This week students will practice the concept of one-point perspective drawing. This is hard to fit into our unit on ancient art because early civilizations tended to create flattened images with little to no depth. In fact, the use of perspective in painting wasn’t seen until the 15th century in Italy. But, of course, ideas…
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Cycle 1 Week 4- African Masks
Though the arts and ethnic groups of Africa are vast, one common trait is the making of masks. Even within this commonality, African masks can land on a broad spectrum from representational to completely abstract. In this lesson we will look at abstracted masks from the regions of Ancient Mali and Ghana (week 14 history…
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Cycle 1 Week 3- Mayan Glyphs
Just like the ancient Egyptians, the Maya had a written language that was based on symbols and pictures. The images used in their writing are complex and in fact required artists to accomplish them. In this way, scribes always had to be artists, and their word for “scribe” reflected this: t’zib means both artist and…
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Cycle 1 Week 2- Greek Vases
The Foundations Guide suggests using Greek vases to practice mirror-image drawing, and whad’ya know! That works perfectly for Cycle 1 and ancient civilizations. We know that the Greeks used symmetry in architecture, and we can see this same love of order and balance in their art. Most of their pottery was symmetrical in shape and…
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Cycle 1 Week 1- Egyptian Art
The new Foundations Guide came out this year, but you’ll notice that drawing for weeks 1-6 are the same as in the past. Since Cycle 1 looks at the history of ancient kingdoms, I will be combining the drawing concepts alongside art from ancient civilizations. Week 1 starts out with the basic elements of drawing…
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Cycle 3 Week 18- Roy Lichtenstein
This will probably be one of your students’ favorite projects this year! Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, inspired by comic strips, are colorful and bold and kids can immediately connect with his style. Lichtenstein’s paintings were large-scale, exaggerating the Ben-Day dot technique used to print colors at the time. We’ll use Q-tips and tempera paint to mimic…
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Cycle Week 17- Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth has been one of my favorite artists for a long while now. For some reason I’m drawn to his melancholy, quiet pieces. Is that weird? Maybe a sign of deeper psychological issues? I don’t know, but I do like his stuff. Like Wyeth, we’ll be painting with watercolors. This medium is a challenge,…
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Cycle 3 Week 15- Georgia O’Keeffe
For the next three weeks, the art lessons will focus on painting technique and color. This week, we will copy a painting by the famous American artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The focus will be on mixing colors smoothly on the canvas, and creating light and dark areas for dimension and contrast. O’Keeffe completed around two hundred…