What Is Art Curriculum?
A good curriculum helps teachers move students through sequential foundational skill sets, providing step-by-step instruction for teaching children. An art curriculum helps teachers teach a broad idea, breaking it down into manageable bits of information within each lesson. For example, learning to draw: a drawing curriculum has a scope and sequence, teaching beginning drawing ideas in steps and moving the student into more complex drawing lessons. A curriculum can help a teacher stay focused and teach important foundational concepts. Curriculums can support each age or grade level and interest.
Why is Art Curriculum Important?
In my experience, teachers who just teach art projects with no teaching focus eventually get frustrated and have no scaffolding to keep track of student progression. By following an art curriculum, teachers can keep track of the students’ progression and even pinpoint the students’ challenges, being able to provide better feedback and more customized art activities to help students grow from that point. Following a curriculum provides measurable outcomes you can track throughout the school year. It also ensures all your students don’t skip around and miss important foundational art elements. Art curriculum keeps you on track, helps you plan out your lessons, ensures students don’t miss out on foundational skill sets, and has trackable growth.
Curriculum That Meets Art Standards
Most teachers today, whether in public or private school, face many challenges with their district or school owner wanting them to support the academic subject matters, which do not cover proper art literacy topics. So the best choice for art curriculum should be one that teaches the elements and principles of design meeting the core art standards, but has the flexibility to be themed with school goals and vision for learning. Quality art curriculum meets international art literacy standards which support the artistic process. Once the curriculum meets art literacy standards, it can be themed with just about any learning subject matter.
For example, I have developed art curriculum that teaches art literacy, but each lesson can transition into teaching fun topics like poetry, botany, cultural or ancient civilizations lessons. Each lesson focuses on an art element and teaching subject matter on a topic students are currently learning in the classroom.
Giving you the flexibility to teach art, but also support the school’s teaching objectives or students’ interests. By following this model, you can alter each sequential lesson for each child’s interest. For example, during my art classes, I would find out what my students were passionate about and have them draw images that reflected their personal interests. Students that loved horses or butterflies, or Batman or Pokémon. A curriculum that is solid can still teach the principles of design in sequential steps and yet give children the creative outlet to use their imagination.
What Styles of Curriculum Can I Choose From?
Curriculums come in all shapes and sizes. Some curriculums just focus on teaching the elements and principles of design, while others have fun themes like animals, cultural ideas, or school topic themes. My art curriculum is themed around learning to draw nature and animals in nature. Some art curriculums can be around thematic topics. Here are just some examples I share in my elementary art guide:
- The elements and principles of design
- Artist contemporary and master fine artist (art history)
- STEAM
- Storybook illustrations
- Seasons
- American holidays
- International holidays
- Life cycle
- Solar system
- Native Americans
- Ancient civilizations
- The natural world
You can see a diverse range of art topics and curriculum ideas by buying my elementary art guide here.
How Do You Know Which Curriculum Is Right for You?
With so many ideas and art projects available on the market, there are very few art curriculums that meet art literacy standards. You might find yourself having to customize and tweak some to meet your needs. The most important thing you need to do is focus on your teaching goals.
Ask yourself a few questions:
- How often do you want to teach art?
- What areas would you like to focus on—drawing, painting, crafting, color theory, etc.?
- Are your students at a beginner level or intermediate level?
- Do you want messy art lessons or easy non-messy art lessons?
- Would you like to theme art lessons with ideas you’re teaching in the classroom?
- Do you want stand-alone art lessons?
- Do you want to follow structured sequential art lesson plans?
Where To Buy Art Curriculum That Meets The Art Standards
Buy Nature of Art® Curriculum –
Are you looking for the best drawing and painting curriculum for teaching children? Art lessons that are step-by-step and sequential? You have come to the right place! These curriculums can save you time! You can schedule art lessons weekly, biweekly or even monthly!
Children love these fun lessons. Nature of Art® curriculums for children cover many topics like painting & drawing, color theory, clay modeling and crafting.
Hi, I’m an artist, homeschool parent, art teacher and art curriculum developer for children. I’ve spent the last few decades teaching thousands of children through my art studio. Like you, when I first started out I didn’t know where to start teaching even though I went to fine art school! I didn’t know what art lessons to start with, what area to focus on, or how to teach the art standards. Plus I couldn’t find any drawing or painting sequential curriculum that scaffold for children’s advancement.
These Drawing & Painting Lessons Scaffold
I became stressed and overwhelmed, I usually had to backtrack art lessons. Therefore I would later find out my students needed to understand a step better before we moved to the next step. Meanwhile, I bought tons of art books, researched libraries and the web for hundreds of hours looking for children’s art curriculum ideas.
My deepest desire was that my students had fun art experiences that lead to creativity. Honestly, some of my students hated certain art lessons I presented to them. I made things harder than they needed to be, and without realizing I took away creative choices.
Things finally turned around for me with a lot of trial and error. But, one day my drawing & painting art curriculum all came together. With an invitation to teach at a school with a hundred students all in different grades. I made the decision to give the same art lesson to all the students. By using the exact same curriculum.
However, I gave them the same exact demonstration and isolated movement. So, I followed up with letting my students create what ever they wanted afterwards. Success!
The 5 Important Art Curriculum Things I Learned:
- Children need to learn isolated movements
- Children need easy 1 to 3 step instructions
- Children need to see a visual demonstration
- Each lesson should reinforce the last skill learned
- All foundational art skills can work for primary thu elementary grades
I have tested these curriculums with small to large groups of children of all ages. I now offer proper scaffold sequential organized art lessons in all areas. My curriculums focus on isolated foundational skills sets. I now offer my art curriculum I use every day in my studio to the public. Buy Art Curriculum Children | Painting & Drawing HERE.
You don’t have to figure all this out on your own, get overwhelmed, stressed, or go to fine art school, I created easy to follow curriculum you can purchase. Plus you don’t have to be an artist yourself to follow these lessons!
Buy
Drawing Curriculum For Elementary Grades
Drawing Curriculum For 3-6 years
Buy Drawing & Painting Curriculum:
You know visual arts education is valuable, however you might not know where to even start—there’s no real painting curriculum laid out for teaching children painting – UNTIL NOW! When teaching art isn’t your strength, creating your own art curriculum can feel impossible to figure out because there’s a LOT to figure out…
- Which painting lesson to teach kids first
- The painting materials and tools you need
- How to present and demonstrate lessons
- And, if you are teaching the right sequence to help kids build practical art skills
Maybe you’ve wasted time setting up a painting workspace just to have it turn into a mess in minutes. Or you’ve wasted energy putting together art projects or trying to build your own painting curriculum that just end up in frustration. Or you’ve wasted money buying the ‘coolest’ and ‘best’ painting materials that don’t seem to interest your kids at all.
Buy Painting Curriculum For Children
Buy Color Mixing Curriculum For Children
DOWNLOAD FREE Color Mixing Art Lesson
Clay Modeling Curriculum For Children
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