Art Co-op

I am not very talented artistically.  My children can draw much better than I can.  I had an art teacher in elementary school that was not very nice and caused me for years to not like art at all.  But, I do think art is important and when I started homeschooling, tried to include art often in our homeschool.  Teaching children about art and artists is easy to do and can be done very inexpensively.  There is a ton of art books, curricula, and art project ideas available inexpensively or for free.

We were blessed to have an opportunity for quite awhile to take a homeschool art class, but that stopped a few months ago. Since then, my children and the children that were in the class have been asking over and over again when we could do art again, so I decided to teach an art co-op a couple of times before the end of this school year.

Today was our first Art Co-op and I chose Claude Monet for our artist.  I picked out two projects that I thought would take around 30 minutes each to complete.  I asked the parents to bring crayons, scissors, glue sticks, and water color paints for the child and I bought the tissue paper and cardstock.  We all pitched in $2 per child to pay for the supplies I bought for this class and the next.  We had 11 children participate today ages 3-9.

I started the class reading a short biography of Monet to the children and showed some examples of his work.  Then we began working on our first project.

The first project was a watercolor resist project based on Monet's The Water Lily Pond.  The children drew the bridge, lily pads, and flowers in crayon and colored them in.  Then they painted over the top of them with water color paints.  The water color paints will not paint over the crayon areas and gives a really nice effect.

The second project was based on Monet's Water Lilies-Morning.  It was an art project using tissue paper to make a layered lilies effect.  I found this project in an Usborne Art Treasury book. First the children tore strips of green, blue, and lilac tissue paper and glued them to their paper to create their pond.  Then they cut circles out of green tissue paper and cut a v shape in them to make lily pads and glued them over top of the water.  Next they crumpled up tissue paper to make flowers and glued those onto the lily pads.  They turned out really cute!

Everyone had fun at our first Art Co-op and we are looking forward to doing it again in two weeks!