History Through Art

Homeschool Review Crew

In our house we adore history.  History makes its way into every subject we do.  But we’re not so good with art.  I’m not good at art but my kids love it.  Enter history through art thanks to a new review.  We recently received Art of the Middle Ages which is part of the ARTistic Pursuits Art Instruction Books with DVD and Blu-Ray series.  This series is through ARTistic Pursuits Inc..  

About the Curriculum

This is a nice hardback book that comes with two discs.  One disc is a blu-ray while one is a dvd so you have the option of using either.  Ideally, kindergarten through third grade is the target grade range for this book.  This is technically volume three in a series of volumes.  Currently there are six volumes to choose from.  Work them in order 1-8(when available) or work through them by subject matter.  Volumes seven and eight are set to be released over the summer of 2018(this summer) so look out for two new titles soon.  All of the series is still geared towards grades K-3.

One of the first pages in the book is going to tell you all of the art supplies needed for the whole book.  These are divided into three sections being art materials, household items, and starter pack materials.  The starter pack materials are items that were used in volume 1 and you might still have available if you used volume 1 first. 

We tried to use the Blu-Ray disc first in our blu-ray player but it kept saying unrecognizable disc and wouldn’t play it.  We had no issues at all with the dvd disc though.

Fun fact.  You can buy the book by itself, you can buy an art package of supplies, or you can buy the book with the art package.  Good to know if you’re like me and don’t get out much to find art supplies.

How We Used

Sometimes it can get tricky for me using an art curriculum.  My kids all love art but most curriculum are not geared for my wide age range.  This one is geared for grades K-3 but I have grades pre-K through 7 here currently.  So we just do it all together anyway.  Each child may be working at a different skill range and not be able to do the project on their own or might need to add some embellishments or help a younger sibling to occupy their time. 

I like how simple this curriculum is.  My prep work is making sure I have the materials on hand to create the masterpieces.  We simply watch the video which explains how to use the materials and then use the book to learn about the project and how we’re going to do it.  Then it’s all fun and games making a gorgeous masterpiece, or a sticky mess if you’re a toddler. 

I do have to admit that the art projects weren’t quite what I expected.  Personally if I’m doing my own stuff for Medieval I’d have my boys making shields out of cardboard and jousting sticks out of wrapping paper tubes or something.  Those are things I think of when I think Medieval History time period.  While we did enjoy these crafts and I loved the information given with them, I have to say my boys were not as excited as if they’d made something dealing with war. 

Modifications

We did skip around a little bit to keep things using similar mediums and styles together.  For instance we did all the projects that including weaving first and then moved onto the collage.  I didn’t have the materials for the mod podge projects so it made sense to skip those until I could acquire the supplies.  This wasn’t a huge deal as my kids were really loving the weaving projects and wanted to do those all together.

As I mentioned above our blu-ray disc didn’t work in our player.  I’m interested to see if it will work in a computer though.  Our current laptop doesn’t accept discs so we’ll be taking this to the library with us next time(if I remember this time!) to see if it works in their computers.

I also did sub in using construction paper instead of gold paper with some of my younger ones as they were having troubles not ripping the gold paper(which was actually a wrapping paper).  My older ones definitely wanted to use the gold paper as they thought it looked awesome!  History through art definitely meets all of our fun requirements plus educational too!

Learn More

Learn more about all the different books available for review and see all the reviews linked up over on the Main Blog Post found on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.  You can also find ARTistic Pursuits Inc on facebook and twitter. Their new series focuses on history through art and sure to be a hit!