Home School in the Woods: Artist Activity Pak

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

My 12 year old daughter, Mercie, loves all things art! She loves to draw and doodle, paint on canvases and work with clay. When I had the chance to review the Artist Activity Pak from Home School in the Woods, I was excited! I knew Mercie would love to learn about artists and different art movements in history.

The Artist Activity Pak is one of the Hands-On History Paks available from Home School in the Woods for grades 3-8. The Hands-On History Paks provide everything you need to make a lapbook - a file folder filled with mini books and foldables containing information. The Artist Activity Pak was provided to me as a digital download, but you can also purchase a CD. The digital download is $18.95 and the physical CD is $19.95.

The first thing I did upon receiving the download was print everything out! Home School in the Woods makes this super easy by providing the download as a ZIP file. Each item is a separate file so everything downloads extremely fast and it's easy to do in chunks if you prefer. I printed out each item and stapled each section together with the directions on top. This made it easy for Mercie to do this almost entirely by herself.

Here is what is included with the Artist Activity Pak:

• Paint Box vocabulary mini book
• Art Medium mini book
• Art Movements mini book
• Paint Like the Masters
• Artist Exhibitions for 33 artists (mini books)
• Art Sketchbook
• Art Gallery Game

The Paint Box vocabulary is a foldable book that contains artist vocabulary words, like tertiary colors. The Art Medium book is a flip book in which Mercie had to put certain art mediums, like pastels and charcoal into different categories, like painting and drawing. The Art Movements was also a foldable that described each of the art movements to be matched with their time period in history.

Paint Like the Masters has ten projects for your child to complete which mimic the "masters" of art. Mercie painted while lying on her back to mimic Michelangelo painting the Sistine chapel.

She used a wooden skewer to paint with dots like Georges Seurat's pointillism.

She painted a lighthouse on a cliff in monochrome like Sesshu Toyo.

She used chalks to make a portrait in the style of Peter Paul Rubens.

She painted a portrait in the style of Picasso.

The Artist Exhibition gave Mercie a chance to do a small amount of research on 33 famous artists, from Picasso to Beatrix Potter. She had to learn the country of their birth, their art techniques, and several of their famous artworks. The directions recommend printing these on colored paper to color code each art movement, but I didn't have colored paper. I had Mercie pick a color for each movement and color the "frame" of the mini-book to color code. It worked just as well!

The Art Sketchbook is a printable journal for your child to sketch her observations in. There is a quote from a famous artist on each page.

The Art Gallery Game is a file folder game that will help your child learn about art history! You will print out 60 cards that have a work of art on one side, and the artist's name, artwork's name, date, and medium used. The goal is to make it all the way around the board by answering questions about the artwork. We played it this way: for each correct answer about the artwork, you could move ahead one space. So if we got the artist and time period correct, we could move two spaces. If we got the medium used correct, we would only get one space. This gave us the potential to move up four spaces per turn. This is a really fun way to get to know 60 famous pieces of art and their artist.

I had Mercie complete all of the components to the Artist's Activity Pak during her independent work time. She spent about 20-30 minutes a day working on the Art-Pak. She really enjoyed doing this! Her favorite part was the Paint Like the Masters. She enjoyed learning about the different techniques and trying to imitate them. She also enjoyed researching the different artists and doing the Art Exhibition mini-books. I really liked the fact that she could do most of this on her own. It's hard to get to all of the extras we want to sometimes, like artist study or composer study. This is a great way to fit some of this in!

We were both very impressed with this Artist Activity Pak! The only negative things I can think of are that it took quite a bit of ink and time to print the Art Gallery Game, but it is worth it to me because I believe the game is really helping us to learn about some important masterpieces. Also, you will need pastels, chalks, and possibly black ink to complete the Paint Like the Masters. If you don't have those you will need to buy them. I spent over $30 in art supplies.

Here are some pictures of her completed lapbook:

Home School in the Woods has many different Hands-On History Paks. They even have one on US Elections, which we completed back in 2016. You can read our review of it here. This is very timely as it's an election year! I'm considering having all three of my home-schooled kids complete this so they can learn about the different parts of our government and how elections work. They already have many questions about it as they've watched some of the Democratic debates and news coverage.

Amy also has a blog called "Words From the Woods" that contains really helpful articles, like explaining the difference in history studies and a la carte history projects.

Click below to read more reviews on some of the different products Home School in the Woods has to offer.