Art Beginnings: A Family-Style Arts Program PDF

Course Overview

Art Beginnings is an activity based history program encompassing art skills like shape, perspective, and form as well as the earliest ancient art on the planet. This method teaches art principles, art movements, and famous art from the past by means of hands-on activities. The best part is the family-style design that allows you to teach all ages at once.

Learn more about how Layers of Learning works.

What’s In This PDF Set?

Ancient History includes nine individual month long units including:

1. What Is Art? – Learn about how art is pervasive through cultures and human societies across the globe, the purposes of art, and why people make art.
2. Art Supplies – learn how to use your art supplies such as paints, brushes, clay, colored pencils, papers, and other implements.
3. Art Elements – This includes line, shape, form, texture, and more of the elements artists use in creating art.
4. Principles of Design – Lean about emphasis, balance, movement, pattern, proportion, rhythm, and unity.
5. Prehistoric Art – from cave paintings to natural pigments to monoliths, learn about the art our earliest ancestors created.
6. Art & Early Civilizations – Learn about the art of the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Chinese.
7. Ancient Art Around the World – This unit dives into the ancient art of Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, and other places around the globe.
8. Greek Art – Sculpture, fresco painting, pottery and more from ancient Greece.
9. Roman Art – Mosaics, architecture, pottery, painting, and sculpture of the Ancient Romans.

A Layers of Learning Arts Lesson

Each Exploration in the units is written as a complete lesson plan. It will direct you in books to read, videos to watch, projects to craft, and discussions to have. The units are clear full of Explorations to choose from and you won’t have time for them all. This is a pick-and-choose curriculum.

Besides the arts lesson for the day the units are lined with sidebars that direct you to discussions, books, famous people, interesting facts, writing ideas, and more.

You will also see a Library List at the beginning and a Show What You Know section at the end that will help you create assessments or tests based on your individual learning.

Reusable and for All Ages

These units books are for the mentor, not to hand to the student. They are supposed to be used repeatedly. Since this is a pick-and-choose curriculum, you do some of the experiments and explorations and save others for later on. If you follow the four year cycle, you will progress through Art Beginnings, Middle Ages Arts, Colonial Period Arts, and Modern Arts. Then you will cycle back to Art Beginnings in the fifth year when your kids are older and learning at a higher level. In all you may use this book three times with your child.

The Art Beginnings units contain lessons ranging from simple paper and paint projects to analyzing the deep meanings behind art pieces. There are plenty of concepts for little kids and plenty to challenge high schoolers. Most lessons are meant to be taught to many ages from 6-year-olds clear up to seniors in high school.  Each age group gets the same Exploration and principles, but they learn on the level they are ready for. Books from your library and video from the YouTube playlists customize the learning for each age.

Extra Resources

YouTube playlists, Pinterest boards, links to helpful websites are all assembled and ready for you to access on the Art Beginnings Resources for Layers of Learning page.

You may also like having a printable Art Beginnings PDF Cover to put in the front of a binder if you decide to print the units.

Printable Packs

Art Beginnings also includes printables for every unit. These are worksheets or paper crafts for the students. The Printable Packs are available as a digital PDF download and come with your purchase on your receipt.

Also Sold As Individual PDFs

The Art Beginnings course also comes as individual PDF units you can purchase one-by-one as you go. The individual PDFs are exactly the same content as the units that are included within the paperback or PDF Art Beginnings book. It’s like buying the course chapter by chapter.