Learn about Women Artists

We’ve already talked a bit about women in STEM for Women’s History Month, but I thought it would be fun to take a look at some female artists, too. Kids can learn about the women, see their art and even make art projects inspired by them. Let’s take a look at some fun resources for learning about female artists.

The Wadsworth Atheneum has a video reading of the book Women Artists A to Z by Melanie LaBarge, which covers women artists and the subjects they painted (example, n is for nature and talks about how Maya Lin uses natural materials and makes works that fit into the environment surrounding them). Or check out this post full of children’s books about female artists from the New York Public Library.

Need more ideas of artists to talk about? These lists overlap a bit, but check out:

6 Famous Female Artists Every Classroom Should Know by Winged Canvas
5 Women Artists of Color from Multicultural Kids Blog
Famous and Should be Famous Women Artists Your Students Should Know by Art Class Curator

Once you’ve picked a few artists to focus on, or let each child choose an artist to work with, you can search for their art and more biographical information online. You may also be able to find projects inspired by particular artists, or you can develop your own. For example Yayoi Kusama is known for the use of dots in her work, so you could use that as inspiration for a classroom project. Or check out these ideas:

These art projects inspired by women artists from Artsy Craftsy Mom include Kusama, Sonia Delaunay, Helen Frankenthaler and more. The one shown above is inspired by Alma Thomas and can be found on Woo Jr.
Table Life Blog has a collection of resources for studying Mary Cassatt, including books, videos and projects.
Artsy Craftsy Mom has several art study lessons for various artists, male and female. Here are her posts on Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo. I love the flower bowl pictured above, which comes from the Crayon Lab.

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply