–The Abeka art series. In the lower grades it is a lot of fun, crafty stuff, so it turns people off who don’t like that kind of thing, but by the 4th grade book – Art A – it is ART. It is not too expensive, maybe about $13 or so.

–Art with a Purpose. From the first grade on this is REAL ART. I will say that it is pretty advanced, so do NOT go by grade level. You can get this at a # of hs sites and the packets are about $5. I found the first and second grade packets to be just too hard for the kids you’d buy them for. The third grade packet is pretty good, and by the fourth grade it is REALLY SERIOUS art. For most kids I would not have them attempt the ones for grade 6 and 7 unless they were teens who were very interested in art and were very talented in this area.

–How Great Thou Art. This company has a whole series of things. We’ve used a lot of them, and I would recommend all of them except the preschool program, which you wouldn’t be interested in anyway.

–Things from Rainbow Resource. Last year we used The Big Yellow Drawing Book, which is about $6 and starts out easy and gets progressively harder. This year one of the things we are using is called “Drawing Textbook,” which has about 210 small pictures of items for the kids to draw, and by just concentrating on drawing ONE item/day, my kids are really improving. I would think that Rainbow Resource would have a lot of other things you might be interested in.

Amy Pak also has a great Artists unit study out, I think it should be up on Homeschool in the Woods within a week or two. It’s one of the best art history units I’ve seen, and comes with a bunch of art project ideas 🙂

http://www.homeschoolinthewoods.com/

There are a lot of lessons, and each one has a key to show you how to tailor it to several different ability levels, so the students on the younger side won’t be overwhelmed and the older students won’t be bored.

It covers many different styles and concepts.

We loved it!

In terms of supplies, we have typical set of basic watercolour paints (the school kind kids often have to buy for their supplies), plus tubes of watercolours and a palette, various brushes, oil pastels, chalk pastels, various paper pieces kept for collages, different types of markers, pencil crayons, wax crayons (some neat stuff you can do with wax crayons–they’re not just for little kids!), construction paper, special paper for watercolour painting, 8×11 paper, 11×14 paper and the ‘super size’ paper… I’ve been thinking about getting some of those watercolour pencils–my mother has some and dd tried them out and loved them. Very neat effects.

Of course, there’s the other component to art if you wish: art history. That can actually make for fascinating art classes if you are structured enough to follow a sequence of some kind: tie in the art history with the art production. You could have a couple of months focused just on painting, each week focusing on a different painter and trying to recreate things. Or try to recreate Da Vinci’s drawings. Things like that.

The book is available many places, such as

http://www.rainbowresource.com

http://www.christianbook.com

and

http://www.hewitthomeschooling.com

Whatever you do try to keep it at their level or they will lose interest REAL quick.

http://www.lessonplanspage.com/Art23.htm

http://www.coreknowledge.org/CK/resrcs/lessons/4.htm

http://childparenting.about.com/b/a/030836.htm