ARTistic Pursuits Inc. Review

The past few weeks both my children have been thrilled to use K-3 Book 1 from ARTistic Pursuits Inc.

The book was easy to use with both my kindergartener and third at the same time. Even though their abilities are different, they were able to do their art in their own style while learning the same element with the book.

The K-3 book has 36 lessons, broken up into three different sections: What Artists Do, What Artists See, and Where we Find Art. If you did one lesson a week, this would be your entire art curriculum for a year! The book lists all materials and teaching supplies you will need for each lesson. so you won't get surprised by what you would need. Because we are a crafty family, we had everything we needed for all the lessons already! The lessons systematically work through how to think like an artist, handling materials, the subject matter, seeing and using the elements of art, and also history of art. Each lesson includes a teaching section, a composition to study, as well as a project to do. It took me about 10 minutes to go through the teaching and composition portion and then I let my children have all the time they wanted to work on the project. Typically, they would do more than one work for each project and had fun expanding on what was required. We really enjoyed working through these lessons together! Although we did MANY lessons, I only want to show you a few of what we did. 

 In Artists Look, we studied nature and drew a pictured looking outside out window at the forest behind our house. This lessons was after a lesson that included a nature walk, so it fits in with a Charlotte Mason homeschool outlook.

In Artists Use Photos, the children made pictures based on photos they chose. This was a great fun because for the last few lessons, my son was only drawing pictures of DragonballZ, so it was nice to see a different inspiration for a lesson.

We did many of the lessons together, and we even took the book to co-op one day!  We created portraits in our co-op using a lesson in the book. It was fun to show the book off to the kids and let them do one of the fun projects. It was one of our favorite co-op lessons of the year. The kids loved working with the markers and oil pastels. Overall we were all very impressed with this art curriculum. This is something I would like to continue using with my kids and I would want to buy the next books for them. It is so much fun to use this book together and it is something I could easily throw into my bag for when we go on vacations to the cabin and it would give the kids something to do on a rainy day. The list price on the website is $47.95 for the book and is well worth the investment since it lasts for the entire year. It is especially worth it for the fun and ease of use!

What we liked:

• "I liked the art projects and that you can do a lot of customization for yourself." ~Sebastian, age 8
• "That we got to color and we got to make anything we wanted but we needed to follow directions." ~Kaelyn, age 5
• It was very easy for the teacher! (I like easy)

What we didn't like:

• Nothing!!