I’m trying to start this now so come next January it’s habit. 🙂

We’re using Discovering Great Artists for very brief bios on artists and kid friendly art ideas related to the artists. We’ll be going into more depth for artists the kids seem interested in and using the Annotated Mona Lisa for another reference.

There’s a link to the left for more images online for the artists in Discovering Great Artists.

The plan is that every Monday we’ll discuss a different artist from now until January. We may then pick an artist per month for next year and as they get older we may try the Ambleside suggestion to do an artist per term. (That may be high school level.) But for now, it’s just one per week.

I’m not sure how to do the musician study, Thursdays is our music day and I’m still searching for a good guideline for which composers in which order. Tips?? We plan to do a musician per month and use Pandora as a resource for listening to pieces.

Eventually, when I get more organized, we’ll be adding a poet as well. Wednesdays is our poetry reading now and I’m just doing children’s poems, Mother Goose, A Children’s Garden of Verse, and so on… stuff that appeals to kids. Shel Silverstein. 🙂

For now we’re doing a very brief intro for these artists and just writing down in their notebooks who we are studying. As time goes by I will have them do much more in depth work – bios, examples of work, so on for the artist, composer & poets each term.

Here are some other artist resources:
– Eyewitness Art series by Colin Wiggins
– The Famous Artists series
– The First Impressionists series
– Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists by Mike Venezia
– Mommy, it’s a Renoir
– Talking with Artists by Pat Cummings
– Weekend with Picasso series
– Women Artists for Children series

But if you have ideas for a good outline for musicians, please let me know. I know nothing so very, very basic is a good place to start. Ideas??

Update: Thanks to an Eric & Abby tip, here is a start based on the First Discovery Composers series –
Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Handel, Chopin, Schubert, Debussy, Vivaldi, Berlioz, Purcell

UPDATE: I asked about this on our main blog and got some wonderful responses, you can see answers to this question over here. Great tips for anywhere and some good ideas specific to the DFW area.