Teaching Kids Art Through Picture Books

Solar Eclipse Day is here, and with it comes a great opportunity for kids to read about Space and practice some fun drawing techniques. But as much as you want to help kids to draw and to be creative--and Space is such a fascinating subject--it can be hard to know where to start. 

Start with a good picture book. When you read with a child, you strengthen the adult-child bond, you introduce them to lots of new vocabulary, you model expression and fluent reading, and you bolster reading comprehension. AND you help kids learn, in this case, about a solar eclipse. 

Encourage your kids to love art and reading by pairing drawing an eclipse with a great picture book! Here is one to get you started: 

A Few Beautiful Minutes, by Kate Allen Fox, is filled with beautiful illustrations and poetic writing that is a quiet invitation to wonder at the amazing phenomenon that is an eclipse. 

Do your kids love creating? Here is a quick way for kids...

Are you a New Year's resolution kind of person? Do you make goals at some point for your kids and your family life, or do you mostly go with the flow? I haven’t always written down my family goals, but I do tend to be goal oriented-I find I get stuff done more when I have time to gather my thoughts, hopes, and dreams, and write them down. Sometimes they just live in my head and I veer my actions toward them instinctively, and sometimes they live in my head and just annoy me because I do nothing about them. 

Goals are signposts. If our actions repeatedly line up on the road the goals are pointing to, we form habits that help us achieve the goal. For example, we might have a goal to exercise 3 times a week this year.  We join the YMCA. Then we go once-it takes a huge amount of motivation because it is unfamiliar and takes extra time. We go again because it felt good.(repeated actions, forming a habit)  Pretty soon we are carving out time 3 times a week, and it is...