Easy Guided Drawing: Benefits and Resources

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Lessons shown above: Trinity Snowman, Quick Turkey Art Project, Hodgepodge Olympic Torch, Lesson from Draw Write Now

This is the fourth and final week of the annual Virtual Curriculum Fair with Homeschooling Hearts and Minds, where a group of homeschool bloggers are sharing what’s working for them this year.

Check out my posts from previous weeks:

This week’s topic is art, music and making our home schools beautiful! Scroll to the bottom for links to the other blogger’s posts.

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*** There may be affiliate links to products on Amazon we use and I think you may enjoy.

Every Thursday, we join up with another family and have an art and music day. I do an art lesson for the whole crew after the older kids have their piano lesson with the other mom. It works beautifully!

For art, I often do open ended painting or crafting sessions. The kids get paints, smocks, and other supplies and just go crazy. It’s an important part of their creativity and development! More recently, however, we also started adding guided drawing lessons (or directed drawing) as well.

Benefits of Guided Drawing

We all know that art is about the process, not the product. However, we have found great value in guided drawing projects and consider it a valuable addition to our art curriculum.

End product looks good and they take pride in it
Easy lesson for the teacher to complete
Usually a low-mess project
Easily incorporated into any art program
Great resources and curriculum available, many free (see resource list below)
Can be used as a quiet time activity
Kids learn tricks, techniques, and shapes to incorporate in to their free-form art
Kids gain confidence in their ability to create beautiful art

What we have found is that the children love to use directed drawing and we love teaching it! They take what they learn in the lessons and incorporate it into their own creations. They also like to re-draw their creations with new variations as they explore different ideas. It has become just as valuable in our homeschool as free art time!

What We Use

Once we realized guided drawing was a good fit for us, we bought the Draw, Write, Now series of books and are working through them. They are great for handwriting practice and a number of other things as well. We also find free guided drawing templates on pinterest for seasonal or topical projects we want to do.