Game Schooling - Prestel Art Game

This year "Art Class" is about reading poetry (over tea, in bed at night, with breakfast, while studying theology...), listening to Classics for Kids radio, hearing excerpts from renowned pieces of literature, looking at types of architecture, placing styles of art & artists on a timeline, and....playing the Prestel Art Game!

We've been playing this for several weeks now, and it's pushed us to learn art terminology, recognize famous pieces, and learn about eras in art history. One thing I really appreciate is that you don't have to start out knowing a whole lot about art and artists in order to progress in the game. There are enough questions that are, "What do you think?" type questions to keep it moving. We use our creative and critical thinking skills to imagine what artists might be trying to say with a piece, what the subjects in a painting might be thinking, and what is most striking about certain pieces of artwork and why. Players "compete" with those questions by seeing if their answers match up with the answers of other players. There are also some "Pictionary" and "Taboo" type challenges.

As a way to extend the learning with this game, we keep the laptop around to look up other pieces of art by some artists or to search for similar styles and eras in art history!

GAMES!

We've been enjoying so many games this year. Thought we'd share a few:

 

 

 

 And we seem to always have a puzzle going lately, too. Whenever Grandma walks into the house, she can't help but sit down & work on the puzzle for a while. This is our newest 1000 piece puzzle with all wooden pieces. The board stows nicely under the couch when we aren't working on it:

Art Studies

I LOVE my local thrift store, and in the last few weeks it has proven itself to be a treasure trove of homeschooling supplies. Today I picked up the Make A Word Bingo Game for $1.5o.
Mane and I have played it already, and I can tell it's going to be another great tool in my reading toolbox (or treasure chest?).

I also purchased The Prestel Art Game for $2.
Mane, Mango & I played this game at a coffee shop this afternoon, and it was great fun! We didn't know the answers to most of the questions, but we had a good time reasoning out the answers, and Mane learned some new art-related vocabulary.

The art game reminded me that a few weeks ago I also purchased Fun With Architecture for $1.50:

This is a stamp set of architectural elements, which can be combined to create buildings and bridges. My plan is for Mane to follow the instructions in the booklet for both a bridge and a lighthouse this week to go along with The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge. I'll take pictures when we're finished! (As a side note, Fun With Architecture is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City! I can't wait to tell Mane that when we begin our stamp project.)

I'm excited to see some art and design work trickling into our time together. Today we saw a sculpture (outside the coffee shop) entitled "Allegory of Excelsior." What made this especially special was that Mane just finished studying the New York flag this last week, and there's a little banner on the New York flag that says, "Excelsior." So, we talked some more about what the Latin word "excelsior" means and what the sculpture and the flag were both trying to represent.

We did actually have a little art lesson last week that I forgot to mention. We did some exercises from Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes. We've done lessons from this book before. So, this was just to get us warmed up. I'm committed to doing some real art lessons once a week (not just craft projects). So, the Drawing with Children book will be my base.