Thinking outside the curriculum box

Often art takes last place in a homeschool curriculum, but in our house art is front and center. It has to be. My kids love it. Their notebook pages from history and science chapters aren’t just dutifully drawn stick people, they put time and effort into recreating what I’ve read to them.

I notice that their drawing improves with each year and I want to continue teaching them new techniques and giving them opportunities to try new things. I’ve used a couple of different art studies over the years, but when I find a curriculum suddenly boring, I tend to fly by the seat of my pants. What I mean by that is that we have tossed the curriculum and we are finding our own inspiration.

Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, it is what we read or see in books has inspired our creativity most days.

In The Cuckoo’s Haiku by Michael J. Rosen, we were inspired by the beautiful watercolor birds and tried to recreate what we saw. The results were surprisingly similar to the ones in the book.

A few weeks ago a biography of William Carlos Williams prompted a discussion on collages and resulted in a a messy, though fruitful, creation of their own poetry inspired collage.

More recently, a reading of Charlotte in Paris, led us on a discovery about impressionism and an attempt at Pointillism, which once again yielded surprisingly beautiful results.

Art is really so easy and it comes natural to children. All you need are some basic supplies and some inspiration, which can come in all sorts of unexpected and inexpensive packaging.