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.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

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