We recently began a new curriculum called Gather ‘Round Homeschool which offers amazing monthly units that let us all learn together without having to adapt or substitute. It has multiple levels so we can choose the Early Elementary for Amelia, the Early Reader for Gwen and even allow T to participate with the Pre-Reader activities. You can read more about our first month with this new curriculum here.
The first month of Gather ‘Round covers North American birds – which is a topic that I am personally obsessed with – so I have been having just as much fun as the girls with this curriculum. So much fun that I decided to go ahead and add lots of additional activities and projects to this month because….well it’s birds and I love birds so why not? I knew we definitely needed to add some more art to the mix so I checked into Chalkpastel.com and their You ARE an Artist lessons and, lo and behold, Nana offers lots of lessons on birds – including several that we are learning about in our Gather ‘Round lessons!
So today we chose to start the You ARE an Artist! Clubhouse Complete Membership so we would have access to all the lessons available by Nana. This will allow us to easily incorporate art lessons into our Gather ‘Round curriculum. Plus, we get to experiment with a new medium – chalk pastels.
Here’s a supply list with links to the products that we used:
- Pastels (here’s a larger set that we will be upgrading to)
- Paper
- Paper Towels
- Pencils (these are the only pencils that are allowed in our house…no exceptions here)
The girls absolutely loved this project and followed along with the video just fine. This was our first experience with pastels so we were a bit nervous starting out but quickly realized the lesson is very well laid out and straightforward. I was happy that we were able to pause and rewind the video when needed so they could really focus on each part of the project.
I also loved that our lesson involved very minimal supplies. We were able to grab the pastels at Joann’s with a coupon and already had the watercolor paper in our art supplies box. Now we are all set to be able to grab our tablet and do a lesson with no prep.
You ARE an Artist offers memberships so you have access to all the courses and subjects but also allows you to purchase specific subject access – like American History, Solar System, Inventors, plenty of seasonal and holiday lessons and tons more. We chose to go with the membership so we had access to everything and could use the lessons to enhance our current curriculum.
There’s a free sampler pack of lessons available so you can try them out and see if it’s something that your kids might enjoy. We would love for you to try out a lesson or two and share your final projects with us!
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