Do you like art? Do your kids like art? Well in answer to those questions. . . . I always HATED art class in school. Really and truly hated those classes and wanted to get out of them. Of course I couldn't do that, but I really was not good at art and knew it. Now my daughter who is 8 loves art and wants to be an artist when she grows up. What was I supposed to do? There was nothing I could teach her at art, my best art was stick people!
Gryphon House to the rescue! Gryphon House graciously let our family and other families of Crew Members review their Global Art book. On the cover it is described as "Activities, Projects, and Inventions from around the world."
I loved that the book is divided up into chapters by continent. Chapter 1 has all kinds of arts and crafts for the continent of Africa. Within that chapter they are then broken up by country within the continent. Each chapter is like this. With each of the crafts there is a did you know section that tells you about the country and why that craft represents them. I loved this! It's not just art but it's history and social studies all rolled into one! Learning more than one thing while being fun is a homeschool mommy's dream!
From pinatas, to mobiles, to books, to masks, this book helps your child tour the continent and participate in parts of their culture while there. My kids were in love and wanted to do more than one project per day. Of course, I was a not nice mommy and only let them do one per day. Like I said, I am not a craftsy artsy type person and needed time to recoup!
Global Art is written by two talented ladies. MaryAnn F. Kohl, owner of Bright Ring Publishing, lives in Bellingham, WA. Our other author is Jean Potter who is a full time writer living in Charleston, West Virginia. The two of them also worked together to write Cooking Art and Science Arts. Cooking Art was published by Gryphon House while Science Arts was through MaryAnn's publishing company.
We received a physical copy of the book. Perfect way to have this book as you're going to want to mark it up! The book sells for $16.95 in the USA. It is designed for children in grades Kindergarten through 5th grade. I was using this with kids ages 2-8 so preschool through 2nd grade. While the older kids of course grasped the concepts better, the younger kids still had a fun time doing the crafts. I think if you were buying this to use for a specific age I would say definitely wait until at least kindergarten. It is a lot more teacher hands on if you're using with younger children and still a lot of helping with kindergarten age in my opinion from what happened in our house.
I do have to say that as a non artsy type person I loved that each of the crafts had step by step instructions so even I could understand them and help my children work through them. Nothing was too detailed or intense that we couldn't figure them out.
If you'd like to see how other families used the Global Art book or the other review item please check into our Main Crew Blog Post to see how everyone else rates them.
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