Our First Homeschool Art Class

There are many things we love about living in a small town. I love my house and the property that goes with it. I love being able to call a doctor who knows right away who you are. I love driving down the road and waving to people you know. I love the friendliness, community, and support of living in a small town. I could keep going on and on but you get the idea. There are disadvantages to living in a small town too, and one of them is the lack of resources for homeschoolers. Even though we have started a homeschool group it is very small and if one or two families can't participate in an activity, it gets cancelled. Our library is teeny tiny and not as kid friendly as you might expect. The only sports we have are through the City Park, and there are no classes offered to homeschoolers.



A few months ago, I received an email from a homeschool group about 30 minutes away. I am the secretary of our group and am listed as the contact person on the Education Alliance website. They were letting local homeschoolers know that they were trying to get an Art Class for Homeschoolers started. There is a lady who teaches Art at one of the local colleges who was interested in teaching a once a month Art class to homeschoolers of all ages. The class was going to be 2 hours long with a charge of $5 per child per month with a maximum per family of $20 per month. The classes were to held about 40 minutes away in a fire station community building with no charge to use the building. The only supplies we needed to bring were markers and an Art pad. I thought this would be a great opportunity for my family to get out and meet some other homeschoolers and to learn Art techniques that I am not familiar with. Tuesday was our first class. I am ashamed to say I forgot to bring my camera to take pictures with. There was a great turnout with 26 participating children and a few tag along younger siblings. The teacher was very nice and good with children. She taught them how to do a story board, draw a picture of a story being told, and an Art technique called Pointillism. I was worried that it would be mostly younger children and Chelsea would be the oldest and feel out of place, but there were 2 other girls that were her age and a few others just a little bit younger. My children enjoyed the class (Anthony (5) did the first project then just drew his own thing, Nick had a little bit of a hard time on one project but did ok on the others.) The class will meet again at the end of October and we look forward to going back again.