
We all try to provide a well-rounded education to our children, and I think that most would agree art is an important component. But there's more to art than just cutting and pasting...there's art appreciation, elements of art and design, and finding a way to link the importance of beauty to the rest of our studies. A daunting task for those of us with little art training. Enter Spears Art Studio, Inc. This company was started by Diane Spears, an artist with a Doctorate in Christian Education/Art (you can see some examples of Diane's art and read her bio here). Diane has created an art curriculum aimed at incorporating God's word and a love of God's world in understanding and appreciating beautiful works of art, as well as learning to create art. She offers both a complete K-8 art curriculum as well as a high school curriculum. As a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew, I was given a copy of the K-8 curriculum on cd-rom and the opportunity to review it.
The K-8 Spears Art curriculum really IS a complete curriculum. It comes to you on cd-rom with pdf files for the overview, the introduction, the scope and sequence, and finally the curriculum divided by month. (Note: it follows a typical school year starting in September and ending in May, but there are plenty of activities here to spread it out to a year-round curriculum.) Each month is divided up into 4 weeks and each week begins with an outline of that week's theme, including the theme objectives, a verse from scripture, a list of recommended images to obtain (from your library or the internet) for art history, "teacher inspiration," and sometimes charts or other visual aids. The teacher inspiration component varies quite a bit from week to week depending upon the topic. For instance, for October week #3 the theme is "Color Studies" and your inspiration consists of an explanation of color as an element of art, a discussion of Biblical color symbols, and several color/eye perception experiments that you can demonstrate to your students. The theme for September week #3 is "Who are you in Christ?" and the inspiration consists of studying Corinthians 3:16 and then discussing our spiritual selves and our physical selves, including distinguishing between our spiritual senses and our physical senses (you can see how this would be related to art).

- September week #3 "Generic Faces" for all grades. The activity was to use the generic face template (both portrait and profile) as a guide to create a face in order to explore facial proportions. This activity was not entirely successful with my kiddos as the idea of drawing a face in profile is a bit foreign to them. They also seemed to feel a little overwhelmed by the generic face given. I would probably relabel this one to grades 3/4 and up.
- November week #4 "Thank You Lord, for my food" for grade K. Templates were given of various types of food you might find on your Thanksgiving plate to color and cut out. Then we pasted them on a paper plate and pasted that to a construction paper "placemat": essentially a collage. My little ones enjoyed this immensely as Mary colored all her foods various shades of pink and purple (her favorite colors) and Peter cut up each of his foods into little tiny bits that we then pasted together mosaic style. The grandparents loved getting these on Thanksgiving.
- November week #4 "Thank You Lord for..." grades 3-5. The activity was to design a Thank You card using the template which divided the space up into various sized rectangles, kind of like a patchwork quilt or a sampler. This reinforced the need for planning out the use of space.
- May week #1 Third Day of Creation: 3-D sunflowers from the templates given or a low-relief flower garden;
- March week #1: A Spring Trees collage;
- April week #2 Fifth Day of Creation Fish and Birds: Magnificent Birds including wax resist, bird mobile, bird prints, and mosaics
- And lots more.
The Spears Art K-8 Christian Art Curriculum is available directly from Spears Art Studio, Inc. on cd-rom in color pdf for $39.95. It is also available in black and white hardcopy (3-ring binder) with the color cd-rom included for $134.95. Prices include shipping. To order or to download the table of contents and some free lessons to try, click here.
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