My Picks for Art History and Appreciation

So funny story, my first teaching job out of college was as an art teacher (actually, I was hired because the art teacher who quit and needed to be replaced the week before school started also taught French, computers, and 6th grade math, and I was the only one who applied for the job who knew any French). I had never taken an art class in my life, so I very quickly decided that I was not going to worry about teaching the kids technique, which I didn't know myself, but would rather give them a year of art history, which I knew a lot more about from French and history classes. We did an art project representative of each time period we studied, and we all survived the year.

So when it came time to teach my own kids, I knew I would be outsourcing the real art classes to actual artists (currently we're all studying watercolor painting with Sarah Cray of Let’s Make Art), but I had plenty of ideas about the art history side of things.

When the kids were young, we picked an artist every month or every semester and learned as much as we could about him or her. I didn't bother going chronologically through art history since it was an afternoon extra once a week and not a daily class. We would get a lot of library books about the artist and would try to go see some of their work over the course of the semester. When we lived in LA, we visited the Getty Center and Getty Villa and LACMA many times, of course, but we have also visited any major art museum in any place we have visited or lived. Little kids can handle an art museum if you study up on some of the works ahead, feed them well beforehand, and only plan to stay for a couple of hours and not see everything in one trip. I highly recommend you take your kids to art museums after the pandemic, but until then, it might be better to stick with books and projects. I recently discovered the Come Look With Me art series, and they are a really sweet way to do a little thematic study. I like to do them one on one with a child in my lap, but I actually moved them from school shelves to the general reading shelves because I found myself reading them to the kids more at random reading times than in a designated school setting.

For projects, some of our most fun and memorable ones including painting upside down like Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel, using sticker mosaic tiles to create designs like the pictures we've shown the kids from our travels in Italy, and q tip pointillism. Ideas like these are all over pinterest, so I won't reinvent the wheel describing them.

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