Real Moms Speak Out:  Heart to Heart

Art Ideas by Real Moms

Katrina Lybbert:  "There are many different ways to incorporate art appreciation  into our studies. We can study the lives of the Artists through biographies and studying their artwork. A new artist a month could be chosen and briefly discussed each day."

Michelle Duker shares the following ideas: 

"Oh, I just love art. A favorite side-hobby of mine through college and grad
school was the art of the periods I studied in history. I just love Early
Modern and Impressionist French art. Oh, I like many others too. But I
love these periods. Degas is my all-time favorite!

"Anyway, we enjoy art in many ways. I buy tons of calendars in the spring
when they are half price and have walls covered with tops of old calendars of
my favorite artists or styles. We are collecting books of art prints as fast
as my budget will allow. We have many books on artists, many for children
older than mine are currently but I am really relishing going through them.

"For my quite young children, we still find plenty to do. We just finished a
study of the book Looking at Pictures: an Introduction to Art for Young People,
by Joy Richardson, which is a wonderful introduction to painting through the
years and different styles and techniques. We go to museums and local art
festivals whenever we can. And books on specific artists for very young
children do exist. My favorites are the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful but
now out of print Art for Children series by Ernest Raboff. We just adore these books!  Lovely full color reproductions and details, drawings, beautiful
hand-lettered commentary and biographical information and other commentary that
just makes the pictures come alive for children!

"Also I regularly scour the cheap outlets like BookCloseOuts and BooksAMillion
for overstock or going-out-of-print remainders at cheap prices. We pick up
anything that sounds like a topic we would like. I found a cute little book,
for example, for $4 recently called Animals in Art that my kids love. Not much
commentary but nice little reproductions of different paintings with animals in
them. Cute!

"I am also a Sister Wendy fan. Her passion and enthusiasm are definitely catching! Any of her books are an excellent introduction---if your kids are too young for the narrative yet there are still the lovely pictures to look at--and she has excellent taste.

"I think art is actually enormously important to study. There are few
better ways to understand a people, what they value and what they believe, than
by studying their art, poetry and literature. You could add music in there too.

"Many of the art books by LDS artists are very child friendly. Not
many nudes and lots of topics that really resonate with children. I recommend
picking up some of the lovely books available, or calendars. I have and love
books of art plus commentary, scriptures or poetry from Liz Lemon Swindle, Greg
Olsen and Simon Dewey and can't imagine life without any of them.

"Buy the prints so easily available at Deseret Books, and buy several of those
sliding frames and you can easily display lovely religious art from the
picture kit or just the single prints available. Or the calendar tops. I
really believe just surrounding children with lovely art and discussing it will
go a long ways to fueling this love in them."  Michelle Duker