One of my favorite thing to teach my kids is art, and one of my favorite art curriculums is Artistic Pursuits Inc. We recently had the chance to review a book in their ARTistic Pursuits Art Instruction Books with DVD and Blu-Ray. The book we chose was called Artists that Shaped the Italian Renaissance. This set of books is for kids in grades K – 3. They do have books the other grades as well.
If your not familiar with the ARTistic Pursuits Inc. curriculum, I highly recommend checking them out. It is a homeschool art program that ties together art appreciations, art instruction, and art history into both text and video lessons. You don’t have to plan anything out other then having the supplies your child will need on hand. The lessons are not long at all. In fact you read a piece of history and then you look at the beautiful art work. There are questions to answer. Then you have your art project. The art project isn’t step by step instructions. It tells you what you need to do and the creativity then comes from your child.
In Artists that Shaped the Italian Renaissance the book tells stores about how these artists shaped the way Western Culture now looks at the world. It starts out with Cimabue’s tilt of the head in the 13th century and goes through the foreshortened and exaggerated forms of Parmigianino in the 16th Century. Your child will be introduced to the discoveries of the period and the new method for making art. An example is during the Renaissance time they used actual gold in their paintings. I don’t remember why off hand. One of the art projects has you using gold as well. In our art project for this we had to get a little creative as I didn’t have any gold card stock. I did have gold glitter paint. So my daughter used that in her painting. Another example was Giotto, he painted people in postures that told something about the way they felt. Most of the paintings before him showed people that were stiff. So the art project had the kids painting gestures. In this book children will express their art with water colors, fresco, scratch art, and oil pastels.
How We Used This:
I used this with my daughter. I know my daughter is a grade older then this curriculum, but I chose it because we have been studying musicians in the Renaissance Period and I thought it would be interesting to add in some art history as well. So it was the perfect combination. We did a lesson per week. I extended her a learning just a little bit more. We did further studies on the artist in more detail. We looked at more paintings that were done by the artists.
I love how the lessons are set up in this book. They are not long and overwhelming at all. I also like that they read a story about the artists and then there are pictures to study and questions to answer. Of course I absolutely love the art projects. The DVD lessons weren’t long but they showed you exactly what you needed to do and how to do it. Now you don’t have DVD lessons to every single lesson in the book.
There are 18 projects that features Master Works in 12 Text Lessons and Art Material Instruction in 6 Video Lessons. The cool thing was that they had both a DVD and a Blu-Ray Disc.
My daughter was excited to start every lessons. She was very engaged in what she was doing and learning about. She was very good about answer the questions to the picture. My daughter is one who likes to NOT listen to directions and go on her own. When it came time to learn about GOLD in the lesson and what she was to do. We didn’t have the gold sheet of paper. So we used gold glitter paint. I did tell her to let her water color painting dry before using the gold…..but she didn’t listen and went her own way. However, she did make the gold stand out in an object like she was suppose to do.
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