Book Review – 50 Art Lessons For Kids

Fifty K-12 Art Lessons: Deluxe Color Edition: Creative Differentiated Explorations In Art

This FULL COLOR book contains fifty differentiated art lessons for K-12 students, with extensions for advanced classes. Many include links within lessons that will connect to mini-video tutorials. Most explorations in his book can be done with different kinds of media. Don’t have oil pastels? Use crayons, colored pencils, or just about any drawing media. Taking a drawing project and re-tooling it to be a painting lesson is often possible. Use what you have on hand.

These are lessons I have developed over my thirty-year art teaching career. I specifically chose these fifty, because the root of each can be simplified for younger students, and beefed up for the more advanced. This is also helpful while working in an integrated classroom where special needs students work alongside their peers. While a class works on a particular lesson, the simplified version can be used as well so that all can work on the same root concepts.

These lessons appear in our other book “Extended Sub Plans For Art Teachers.” However, this book is designed with the classroom art teacher in mind, so it does not include media tutorials needed for a sub. This book ends with critique worksheets, grading rubrics, classroom resources, and enough sub plans for 25 days of absences! Many additional free resources, videos, plans, and more can be found on the author’s blog at Artedguru.com.

Next Plan Idea:

Celebrating Holi with Kids

I’m in deep denial about the fact that new year is almost upon us again! It’s been the fastest and the longest year at the same time, and I can look back and see some good things as well as some things I wish had gone differently.

Doing a year in review with your kids — whether in the classroom or at home — is a good way to capture some of their memories and the things they really liked about the year gone by.

There are a lot of different printable year in review worksheets you can use if you want to make this super easy. Here are links to a few (often part of larger posts about NYE celebrations with kids that are worth a read, too):

Teach Beside Me has lots of fun printables fro the end of the year, including a year in review that covers favorite memory, funniest memory and the best book they read, among other topics.
NurtureStore‘s version has space for a self-portrait and prompts like favorite toy, best day out this year and future dream job.
Remember favorites, their “best idea” of the year and have room for setting goals for next year with this one from The Keele Deal.
The year in review from Yes We Made This has room for drawing or writing and includes things like something they learned, a memory they made and a place they visited.

Of course you could pretty easily make your own year in review for the whole family to do that asks questions based on what you most want to remember. (Favorite video game? Best friend? Favorite family memory?)

And if after the year in review you’re ready to look ahead a bit, Mrs. Merry has new year’s resolution printables to inspired kids to look ahead and set goals for things they want to try. You can totally fill this one out as a grownup, too.

[Photo: Mrs. Merry]

Next Plan Idea:

Have you read?

Leave a Reply