An Artful Summer (that is still relaxing)

The summer of reading, rest, and art appreciation. Every year, I try to evaluate where we are at, what we need, and how we can best spend our summer. After a year of many appointments (8-10 a week) and lots of activities, I mostly want to rest. We will still have multiple appointments each week, but thankfully, a few of those are coming to an end.

I want this summer to be a time where we can spend several days at home most weeks, enjoying time outside with the water mat, bikes, ninja course, and more. I also want to encourage my children to continue reading for fun and to improve fluency.

Overall, those were my goals for this summer: lots of reading and relaxing, with some pool and river time thrown in.

However, my boys have fallen in love with the Restorationists book series and, in turn, with Van Gogh and other famous artists. So, I have decided to find very easy and low-stress ways to include the fine arts in our summer./

I did not want something that would feel like a chore to them or me, so I am not adding a big class or plan. We are going to finish the restorationist series on audiobook during any driving time, and we have a fun day trip planned to the art museum with their cousins.

We also had the opportunity to stop at the Van Gogh Immersive Experience on our way to a camping trip last weekend, and I highly recommend it if you have an art lover in your life. We were fortunate enough to be going right by where it was only about a week before it closed, and we grabbed tickets at 40% off! My eight-year-old was already talking about wanting to go back before we ever left the parking lot!

Other than those two things, I am simply coming up with a list of ideas that we can implement, and whenever we have time, I’ll choose one from the list.

For example, Nana with You ARE and Artist has some great art lessons, including ones about famous artists. For example, here are several great ideas for Van Gogh.

HiGASFY has some fun videos about Van Gogh and other artists; there are library books, virtual art museum tours, and more that will only take a few minutes and require little to no prep from me.

This will allow them to dive deeper into their interests while not adding work to my plate this summer. Having a list to choose from, rather than a detailed plan, will also help me feel like I’m not failing if not everything gets done. (Tell me I’m not the only one who struggles with that.)

If interest remains strong in the fall, we can be more structured with one of the fine arts courses from You ARE an Artist.

I am adding the list of summer fun fine arts activities to the free content library, including links to some great virtual tours, so if you want to dive into fine arts this summer, make sure to grab it! You can also grab our free summer reading log to help encourage and track reading this summer.

Resource Library and Affiliate Disclosure

When you sign up for the Schoolin’ Swag free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

Resource Library

This post may contain affiliate or referral links, including Amazon affiliate links. As always I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog.

Deals and Freebies

Schoolhouse Teachers is now offering a lifetime option! They are a great place for a one-stop shop curriculum or a way to have a lot of options to fill in different electives and courses into what you have already chosen.

Simply Draw with Bob Parsons

Simply Draw is an easy-to-use art curriculum from Timberdoodle that teaches students how to draw through simple, easy-to-understand lessons with clear illustrations and supporting video materials.

What is Simply Draw with Bob Parsons?

The 178-page book includes 77 lessons; approximately 20 of those lessons have accompanying videos. In addition, there are three extra video lessons to complete at the end of the curriculum.

In addition to the curriculum, students will need a few materials. They can get started with a couple of pens, pencils, and a good eraser. However, the curriculum also recommends some cardstock and cool grey markers. A good list of recommended pens and pencils is included in the first lesson.

What Lessons Are Included?

The lessons are short and take my son around fifteen minutes to read and complete. They start with the basics of drawing, including grip, posture, and drawing lines. The lessons become gradually more complex, so they are not overwhelming for the student.

Topics Covered:

Getting Started
Short Parallel Lines
Seeing Angles
Basic Shapes
Basic Drawing
Hands
Lettering
Stick Figures and Action
Textures and Patterns
Additional Lessons

Each lesson includes instruction given in short, simple statements with example pictures. The student has the opportunity to work through each step in the space provided, right there in the spiral-bound book, where they can still see the examples. The first few were basic lines, but then it moved on to having them use different techniques to shade pictures, including an apple, a rose, and Chuck Norris’s face. My son is a Chuck Norris fan, so this lesson was a big hit!

What We Loved About Simply Draw

Unlike some books that only teach students how to draw specific things, students can easily transfer the skills and techniques learned in this book to other drawings. Once students understand lines, angles, and basic shapes, they can begin putting those skills together to create different drawings.

I have noticed over the years that art, as with many other subjects, comes more easily to some students than others. Sometimes programs move too fast, and students get behind and feel like they cannot keep up. However, with Simply Draw, students can work through the book at their own pace. This program is easy to implement for both parent and student.

In addition to the instructions, there are many funny, comic-style drawings and silly sayings in the book that make it fun to work through and add an extra layer of enjoyment. For example, in the lesson with the cube, a man is “trapped” under it. He says, “When they said this job would be “smashing,” I thought they were British.

A Student Opinion

My eleven-year-old son loves art and has been doing a variety of painting and other art lessons for several years. However, he has really wanted to learn more about drawing and sketching. He loved taking this course and is excited to continue improving his drawing skills as he progresses through the rest of the course.

He said he enjoyed the program because it was easy to understand and that he felt it was improving his drawing skills.

Conclusions

Overall, Simply Draw is an easy-to-use program that only requires a few materials. It works well for students from elementary school through adulthood (it is best if they can read or have someone available to read to them). I’d highly recommend this program for students who want to learn to draw and sketch. Go to Timberdoodle to find out more and purchase your copy of Simply Draw with Bob Parsons.

Picto Kits Mountains: A Timberdoodle Review

As a homeschooling mother of five, with one of my boys especially interested in art, I am always looking for fun new art projects. Art helps develop fine motor skills, creativity, and many other skills. Timberdoodle recently gave me the opportunity to review a product that was new to me: a Picto Kit.

What is a Picto Kit?

There are multiple designs within the Picto Kit line, but we reviewed the Mountains kit. These kits use wood and fabric to create a fun and beautiful work of art. The child gently removes precut shapes from the wood, chooses fabric from the variety included in the kit, and covers the wooden pieces with different colors and patterns of fabric. The kit comes with a wide variety of upcycled fabric scraps to choose from (or you could use your own).

Once the wooden pieces returned to the frame, it is screwed onto the included block of wood using the included screws and the predrilled holes. The overall size is 7.5 in x 9.5 in. The Mountains kit makes a beautiful picture of two mountains with clouds in the sky and a big round sun at the top.

A short video tutorial (about four minutes long) explaining how the kit works can be accessed through a QR code. The directions were simple enough that my eleven-year-old son was able to watch the video and complete the project independently.

The kit includes all of the materials necessary to complete this project, but you will need a hammer, screwdriver, and scissors.

If your child wants to paint the wooden block, you must provide paint and brushes. My son chose not to paint his, and it still turned out beautifully.

From start to finish, the project only took him about thirty minutes to complete.

Five Things We Loved About Picto Kits

You can unscrew the frame and trade out the fabric to make new designs as many times as you want, so it does not have to be a one-and-done project.
The different fabrics and geometric shapes encourage creativity.
Adding tools to art was a lot of fun for my son.
It was simple enough for younger children but creative and fun enough for even adults to use.
The wooden block and frame make the completed project very study.

The artist with his completed Mountains Picto Kit.

Who Should Use Picto Kits?

Overall, I think these are great projects for a variety of ages. They are beneficial as a part of your homeschool art studies or just as a fun project for your art-loving child. They would be a great summer project to sneak in some learning through play. The various colors and textures of the fabric, along with the fact that you can keep changing the fabrics, allow for a great deal of creativity and imagination.

You can hang the wooden frame on the wall to show off your child’s work, have them re-do the picture as often as they like, or even gift their artwork to a friend or relative. The sturdy wood and beautiful fabric easily make an art project suitable for gifting.

Find out more about these kits, and check out all the different designs at Timberdoodle!

Sticker Hero: A Timberdoodle Review

Stickers are so much fun for children of all ages, whether just using random pretty stickers to decorate a paper or activities that use stickers. Timberdoodle recently gave me the opportunity to review Sticker Hero, a fun sticker activity book.

What is Sticker Hero?

Designed for ages three and up, this activity book includes 506 stickers and 48 pages of sticker activities. The pages are bright, colorful, and made from thick paper to be more durable for little hands.

The activities include matching, counting, decorating, mazes, and more. The stickers for each activity are located in the back of the book and conveniently separated by activity. This allows you to either show the child the correct stickers or even take the correct ones from the back of the book to simplify the activity for younger children.

Working with stickers naturally enhances fine motor skills, but these activities also work on counting, sorting, matching, and observation skills. There are even activities to work on the alphabet.

For example, the first activity has a bunch of colorful socks hanging on a clothesline, and the child has to find the matching sock stickers to put beside the one already on the page. Another activity has them filling in the numbers on a clock, telephone, and remote. There is even a page with word problems, where a child has to work with the concepts of less than and more than to put on ice cream scoops.

Who Should Use Sticker Hero?

Children, especially preschoolers, need lots and lots of physical activity and movement. However, sometimes, you need them to sit quietly for a short time. This might be during learning time at home, sitting through a meeting, or waiting for an appointment. This book is small and convenient for taking on the go, but it is also great for your time at home.

The activities include a variety of levels, and depending on the child, they could be used from around age three to six (or older if a child has a delay or is still working on those skills).

The book could be just a fun quiet activity or it would be easy to incorporate into a homeschool day.

Where Can I Find Sticker Hero?

My son loved it and kept asking to do more pages. While some of them were very basic for him, he enjoyed each activity that he did.
You can see more and purchase your copy over at Timberdoodle. It is available independently or as a part of their Pre-K kit.

Simple Summer Learning Ideas

Each summer looks different in our family, but I always need a break from our school schedule. Our schedule with two teens is a bit busier than usual this year. My teens love church camp and are spending several weeks attending as campers and helping as junior counselors, my son is in the busy season of his farming business, and my daughter also has several weeks of day camp for her music.

Some links in this post are affiliate links, see disclosure below.

I didn’t want to overfill my plate, but I did want to make sure to spend some time focused on my two younger boys as well. We are making a conscious effort to include plenty of time for homemade popsicles, read-alouds, and water play in our days. (Check out our summer bucket list post for more ideas on this.)

However, I also wanted to include some educational activities for them without making it feel like we were “doing school .” I found a lot of great free or inexpensive options for fun summer learning. These are great for various ages and can keep children growing and engaged while having a great summer.

Science Courses

Journey Homeschool Academy (our go-to choice for high school science) is offering several online science camps that are fun for the whole family. They send an email with a video once a week, so it is a small time commitment but a great way to engage together as a family.

Art Camp

We have been using art lessons from Nana over at ChalkPastel.com for years, and we love them. They have some fantastic ideas for using the lessons to create your own summer art camp. In our area, the days can get really hot, so by lunchtime, I am looking for activities that my children can do inside to get a break from the heat. Art lessons are the perfect solution. We try to do art throughout the year, but it is much easier to make extra time for it during the summer and encourage my children’s creativity. Their summer camp ideas are all included with their membership.

Summer Reading Programs

There are some excellent summer reading programs available. First, I highly recommend checking with your local library. Ours has some great summer activities and reading logs, the kids can fill out to earn prizes for their reading. Books a Million, Barnes and Nobles, and Book It all also offer summer reading programs that are free.

Nature Study

While it does get hot here in the summer, and we often try to spend afternoons indoors, we enjoy spending lots of time outside exploring and playing together. Summer is a great time for nature study. There are so many plants blooming and fruiting, birds and animals are active and visible, and if you live close to water like we do, you can cool off at the river or lake while exploring. You can study nature simply by being outside, observing, and reading about what you see. However, if you’d like help or some fun ideas, my two favorite nature study resources are our Homeschool Nature Study membership and the Peterson First Guides.

Bowling

This one may not be educational in the traditional sense, but it is a great way to get in some physical activity in the air conditioning on those really hot or rainy days. This free summer bowling program is valid at hundreds of bowling alleys across the US. Our family loves it because it is so inexpensive (2 free games per day for the children, and adults can join at a very discounted rate to be able to bowl with them) and lots of fun.

Enjoy Your Summer

Finally, make sure to take time to relax and have fun. We love including educational activities throughout the summer, but there is value in downtime and play and fun. Do not feel you must plan and schedule every minute of the day or week. We include 2 or 3 things each week that are fun and educational and read most days. That allows for plenty of free time and creativity.

What fun and educational ideas do you have for this summer?

Resource Library

Have you signed up for #LifeSkillsNOW? This is such a fun and beneficial program.

Life skills help kids be confident, capable, and ready for anything.
Your kids and teens will build critical thinking and know deep down that they can do hard things.
Productive screen time instead of passive scrolling
The #LifeSkillsNow Screentime Promise: We promise to give your kids the shortest amount of (productive) screentime possible, and then OFF into the real world.
Expose your kids to topics you’ve never thought about (and might not know yourself).
Bridges the gap in traditional education with practical life skills, critical thinking, tech savvy habits, and understanding money

If your feeling a bit overwhelmed with homeschooling and all the decisions and options, check out this boot camp with Kerry Beck that is live next week!

Journey Homeschool Science has some great online summer camps coming up soon! They are a fun way to keep the learning going for the whole family.

Giving the Gift of Art: Art of the Month Club

*Some links are affiliate links; see full disclosure below*

My eight-year-old wanted to give gifts to many of the special people in his life, and he had been saving up his money to be able to purchase gifts. However, he is eight, so his budget was still limited. He wanted to be able to do something special, but that didn’t cost a fortune.

We discussed it, looked at his budget, and designed a fun idea that would be special and inexpensive.

What is the Art of the Month Club?

He created Benjamin’s art of the month club. You could title it whatever you wanted and choose the frequency that works for you, but the idea is that they would be getting new art once a month.

We found artwork frames that are easy to open, add new artwork, and store the older painting. We purchased ours from Michaels Craft Store, but you can also find similar ones on Amazon.

(I did realize after purchasing that I was going to need to get some bigger paper to fit well into the frame, and I was able to get these pads relatively inexpensively.)

Benjamin loves doing paintings with chalk pastels or acrylics and often gives them away. This idea allowed him to gift art in a way that made them easy to display and store.

He used one of the beautiful nativity chalk pastel lessons from Nana at ChalkPastel.com to put into the frames. Then we typed up a paper that explained to the recipient that each month for the next year, they would receive a new painting from Benjamin.

With the frames he gave them, they can simply open the frame and put the new picture on top of the old one. Super simple and easy, even for those with strength or motor skills issues.

With our You Are An Artist Membership, Benjamin has access to hundreds of different lessons and can choose a new painting each month that goes with the season, a holiday, or just something he thinks the recipient will enjoy.

Other Art Gift Ideas

Benjamin gave these to both sets of grandparents. Since he gifted it to the pair, he had a meaningful Christmas gift for two people for about $15. He also chose some simple document frames from the dollar tree to put paintings in for some other relatives and neighbors whom he was gifting just one picture.

While we used this idea for Christmas gifts, it would work great for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or a birthday.

He loves creating and sharing his creations, and the people in his life enjoy seeing his art and knowing he was thinking about him when he did his paintings.

If you are looking for even more ideas for gifting art, you can check out this post about The Art of Kindness.

Do you use any artwork for your gifts? I would love to hear other ideas for sharing your art with those you love.

Resource Library and Affiliate Disclosure

When you sign up for the Schoolin’ Swag free resource library, you will get a link and password to the library; we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you updated on what we have going on.

Resource Library

This post may contain affiliate or referral links, including Amazon affiliate links. As always, I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in, and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog.

Deals and Freebies

If you have not tried SchoolhouseTeachers.com, you don’t want to miss this sale!

This Celebration Bundle is a great deal, and you can use code: schoolinswag to get an extra 10% off! There are over 60 products to add fun and celebration to your homeschool throughout the year.

My favorite fitness program has a new membership. Fit2B Lite offers a few great workouts that change every month for an even lower monthly rate. You can try this program out right now for less than $4 a month, and you get a free 7-day trial. It is a great way to get started on your new fitness goals without the overwhelm of hundreds of workouts to choose from.