Art History for Young Kids - Week 1 - Pre-Historic Art

So as most of you you know I homeschool my kids. As an art enthusiast this had to include Art History. There are programs for math, reading, writing, science, history, and geography, all age appropriate for grade school kids. But not Art History.

So I wrote my own.

Check back each week on the new "Art For Kids" tab and you can see what each week entails.

This week is the beginning, Pre-Historic Art

We looked through EH Gombrich's "Story of Art" (My old Art 101 text book) and saw early European cave drawings, then we went to Youtube and took a tour through several of the caves. I also explained to them what the depictions where (historical records and not "just" art)

Now for the hands on part:

Activity 1: I took this picture and enlarged it to fit an 8 1/2 x 11 page
Then we took these figures and glued them on to our cave walls and made our own cave drawings.

If you look at the three icons you will note they are different styles..

• The men are kinds neutral, though they lean slightly to a more American Indian style
• The Horse is from the caves in Southern France and
• The Bull is in the style of the caves in Spain

Activity 2: Then I took a pieces of brown velour and cut out "animal skins" and let them color on them with fabric markers. All the while reminding them art then was for telling stories and recording history, so they had to tell a story in their drawings.

Activity 3 - Painting with MUD, this link also has a clip about how the caves where found that kids will enjoy
http://www.kinderart.com/arthistory/cavepainting.shtml

Next week finds us in Egypt, so stay tuned...