Picture Study with a 4yo

We have it; I’d wait a bit so that your little one can enjoy it more. I’m not sure if the ‘Come Look With Me’ books are still available, but they are very sweet and we’ve enjoyed them for years.

Blessings,

Cindy

I have a 4-year-old and we have both enjoyed the James Mayhew kids’ fiction books: Katie meets the Impressionists; Katie and the Mona Lisa, etc. They are adventure stories of a little girl, her grandmother and various museums. In a clever way, they introduce children to famous works of art! I was thrilled when my son identified artwork at a friend’s house that he had seen in the book. There was one in the series I didn’t like as much as the others, but I think they are worth a look!

I’m pretty straight forward in my artist study.  I print up 6 to 8 pictures (on my printer using photo paper) per artist and stick them in sheet protectors.  Each week we look at one picture, discuss it, talk about what we like, etc.  We also read a few pages from a book about the artist each week.  We absolutely love the Mike Venezia series.  My kids read through these “just for fun.”  I always have intentions of displaying the picture of the week on a wall somewhere, but I always forget.  We’re creating a nice little notebook of all the pictures we’ve studied though.  I also have intentions to write what they say and slide that in the sheet protector at the back so they can read back over their observations, but alas, I rarely get around to that.  We usually look up the painting online too because often the coloring is different from my printer and we can see light and dark better.

My older boys have been doing it this way for 4 years.  My 5-yr-old has tagged along with them.  He has lots of comments and can name pictures just as well as his brothers.  I usually let him narrate first though so he can choose the more obvious things and let the olders catch the smaller details.

Sometimes we’ll try to create art using the same style as the artist we study but mostly I just sit back and let them explore.  I’m always amazed at what they come up with on their own, with no prompting from me.

[Ambleside Online] has a yahoo group called AO Art and when you join, they have pictures you can download in PDF format and print out.  We’ve done this too!

Moderator’s Note: Regretfully, we had to remove the link in this post to honor Ambleside Online’s request that you may link to them only with permission. 

Oops!  Sorry about that link faux pas, guys.  I’ll try to make a mental note of that in the future.