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.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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