Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site Newsletter
Volume 20. Issue 1.
Art, Crafts and Artists through Books for Kids and Teens
Featured Subject with Classroom Activities, Nonfiction, Novels and Picture Books for Preschool through Grade Nine
This issue begins our 20th year of this newsletter! It's hard to believe that 19 years have passed since the web site first went online in 1996 and we sent the very first email newsletter out. When I try to think about what to say about such a span of time in the high-speed world of internet publishing all I can think of are clichés. How time has flown. How I've treasured the opportunity to write to you. What moves me most, though, is that when I sent out the first newsletter my mom, Carol Hurst, was by my side as we launched our great mother/daughter adventure. Nine years have gone by since her death, but, of course, I still miss her.
In this newsletter I feature art, crafts and artists. It was great fun to work on. There are so many wonderful books and so many great connections to the rest of the curriculum. I could have gone on adding dozens more books, but these 31 titles will have to do for now.
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With the arts and other "extras" all but eliminated in many schools, it's wonderful when you can incorporate art across the curriculum. Art, crafts and artists, as a unit study, goes across the school curriculum nicely. All the wonderful books below bring us quickly to the language arts. World history and cultures are somewhat obvious, but science and math are also deeply intertwined with arts and crafts.
There's mathematics in perspective drawing. The Golden Ratio (including the Golden Rectangle and the Golden Triangle), officially discovered by Pythagoras, has been everywhere in art since ancient times. Artwork is a great place to practice mathematical concepts like patterns (see our article on teaching math patterns with books), symmetry, and basic geometry shapes. Artists like da Vinci and Escher used math extensively in their art. Then there's the engineering involved in creating sculptures that won't collapse, the business finances of craftpeople and artists' colonies, and more.
In science, art is beautifully represented in the work of Audubon and botanical drawing. Naturalists have a long history of drawing what they observe and there can be tremendous science and art value for students attempting that kind of drawing. Science is involved in the restoration of valuable art and in the methods used to authenticate a piece of art. Photography is used in current science observation and wonderful examples of science photography can be found in the books below on lizards and Snowflake Bentley.
In the activities and books below you'll see many ways to integrate art with history, cultures and geography.
Read the rest of this article.
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Related Areas of Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site
- Quilts through Children's Books Featured Subject with recommended books and ideas for classroom activities.
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Color through Kids' Books
A Featured Subject article from Carol Hurst's Library Corner column in Teaching PreK-8 Magazine.
http://www.carolhurst.com/subjects/color.html -
Author Studies
A listing of all our classroom individual author and illustrator study articles. - Subjects Index: A listing by subject of our Featured Subject Articles with classroom activities, recommended books and links as well as our Annotated Booklists.
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That's it for this issue.
Happy reading!
- Rebecca Otis
You can read back issues of this newsletter in our archives at:
http://www.carolhurst.com/newsletters/newsletters.html
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