About the Book

Book: Teaching Art
Author: Jerry E. Twitchell
Genre: Nonfiction EDUCATION/Teaching Methods & Materials/Arts & Humanities
Release Date: February 20, 2019

As Simple as 1-2-3 Everything needed to structure and teach an effective art program for grades one to three is made simple for the home-school parent or teacher.

This step-by-step process for teaching art is perfect for home-school teachers or parents with limited art skills or time to create their own programs. This system of insight, responses to judgments, ideas, and feelings aligns with public school and state visual arts requirements.

Teaching Art in the Primary Grades is designed to foster lifelong interest in the arts, provide a gauge of what can be expected of children at various ages and grade levels, and present a baseline for measuring growth and skill.

Lesson plans with goals, objects, time frames, techniques, steps, illustrated examples, and assessment of growth are included.

Click here to get your copy.

About the Author

Jerry E. Twitchell, DEd, is a retired educational administrator and art and history instructor. With over thirty years of experience as a teacher and principal, Jerry has nurtured primary through secondary students to experience the excitement of art. In his work with parents, teachers, and especially children, he has sought to bring to life a love and passion for art.

More from Jerry

Ever since I was young, I have always loved art. It was only natural for me to be teaching and sharing the love of art to young people. Over the years, a number of parents, students and fellow teachers and administrators suggested that I should write a book about teaching art, particularly to the emerging beginning artist. This would hopefully help them gain confidence in themselves in return would flow into their reading and writing subjects. After retiring, pondering and headaches, I started putting it together and throwing around ideas to myself on what should be included and “Wala”…..here it is.

My Review:

I am not an artist at all but, throughout the years I have learned alongside my children in our homeschool. Art I wanted it to be more than just watercolors and crayons. We have used several art books and online art resources throughout the years. We found that many of them or too simple or a bit more advanced. I spent a lot of time on the internet to come up with weekly art lessons. My kids are now middle and high school.

Teach Art in the Primary Grades is intended for grades 1 through 3^rd grade.

Each grade is broken up in units in which each grade has 5 units. Those units are broken down by lessons. Each unit varies in the amount of lessons some with 8, 6, 10, and a few with less depending on the topic.

There is an Introduction that breaks up the levels in four goals that are recommended to be met. They are all reasonable goals and nothing that couldn’t easily be accomplished.

The curriculum Expectations are laid out for 36 week school schedule with 2 hours a week. Granted I don’t agree with that working in the average homeschool schedule as we homeschoolers tend to accomplish much in a shorter time frame. The activities in my opinion aren’t that time consuming. They are a few that I could see in that time frame.

Each grade level has Objectives at the beginning.

The lessons give you a time frame for the craft and some a view point of pointing out a concept of art. There is material list of supplies for each lesson. All the supplies needed are pretty basic materials. There are a few things that you may need to purchase like a brayer, butcher paper, and a few other things.

Most of the lesson had a technique others have steps, and notes. All the lessons give you instruction whether it is talking about the project or more details. The notes are things like: baby food jar work well for mixing tempera paint and such. It may be something like making Mache’ Paste.

A few lessons even have vocabulary words that require a bit more work going over the words.

Printables throughout the lessons when needed that you can reproduce are contained within the lesson.

The lessons do have a good mixture of media to explore and the lessons progress with the grade levels. You have clay, pencil drawings, paper mache’, and varies types of paint.

The book also includes assessments for you to use with the art a project which wasn’t something I’ve seen in an art program.

This art program could easily be used for a homeschool, co-op art class, and in a classroom setting. For the most part all the lessons are pretty self explanatory. Some of them I wasn’t sure of. A few of the projects I was surprised to see a few the projects for grades as they seemed a bit more advanced. However there weren’t a lot of them. It could be that the layout of the activities build upon themselves to do the activities.

What I didn’t like:

I didn’t like the printable reproducibles are in the lesson itself. It would be better in the back of the book where it would be easier to print. I could take them out of the back of the book too. Laying out a book on the printer this thick would be a bit challenging in my opinion. Better yet, it would be easier if they came in a small loose leaf packet.

I would have loved to see a complete list of supplies broken down by grades in one place to make planning easier.

Overall this is an impressive primary grade curriculum that I would have been happy using in my homeschool when my kids were younger. It sure would have saved me a lot of time back then.

I received a free copy of this product from Celebrate Lit Bloggers in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way. All opinions I have expressed are my own or those of my family. I am disclosing this information accordance with the FTC Regulations.