StartsAtEight.com has a great post on how to help your tween and teen-aged student dramatically improve their drawing skills, utilizing “right brain / left brain” exercises as popularized in the book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. Included are links to five downloadable lessons to help guide your student into putting this into practice.
PS. This really works.
CLICK HERE to go to the website!
Our daughter Jess has published three volumes of her very popular “Finish the Drawing” book series on Amazon. Today we’re featuring this delightful sampler of reproducible pages she has put together from those volumes to get your kids’ creativity flowing and have loads of fun in the process.
Just print out the pages you want to draw on, grab a pencil, pen, crayons or markers and go to it. What could be simpler? No more “I don’t know what to draw” blues!
Whether you use these for art lessons, or just for fun, these are a great way to stimulate the imagination and get your kids off the screens for a few hours. Check it out and see how fun these creative drawing prompts can be.
(Jess would love to see your finished creations and share them on social media. You can Instagram tag her: @rollingdonutpress and use the hashtag #FinishTheDrawingBook – or email her at: RollingDonutPress@gmail.com )
Here’s the link to download this PDF ebook:
FINISH THE DRAWING STARTER PACK
(If you are on a PC, right-click the link and “save link” to your computer. If using a Mac, press the “control” key and click the link, then save to your Mac!)
If your kids are interested in animation and learing how to animate their own cartoons, here’s a great collection of beginner lessons for them from professional animator Larry Lauria.
The Toon Institute’s free animation course offers a baker’s dozen lesson on the basics of animation, including the basics of animating a bouncing ball, squashing and stretching animated objects, character and face construction, timing, how to “thumbnail” a scene, and much more. These are a lot of fun, and explain the fundamentals of animation very well.
CLICK HERE to go to the site!
FirstPalette.com is a free children’s craft site, with hundreds of colorful step-by-step craft projects for young students.
If you search a bit (mainly under the category “World and Culture” which we link to here), you’ll find a couple dozen neat history-oriented craft projects, including the Egyptian hieroglyphic stones, Roman helmets, Chinese art scrolls, Medieval Crowns, and many more. These would be great to do when studying different historic eras or other countries.
CLICK HERE to go to the site!
Today’s resource is this lovely collection of vintage illustrated Mother Goose rhymes, taken from various books from the late 1800s & early 1900s.
Great for coloring and for learning or re-visiting these classic childhood rhymes. Enjoy!
To download this PDF coloring book, RIGHT CLICK HERE and “save link” to your computer. Mac users, press the “control” key, then click the link and save to your mac.
The EduPics site has 1000s of clip art images, coloring pages, pictures, photographs and handicrafts. Everything has been classified in themes which are commonly used in primary education. The coloring pages are especially designed to be used throughout the year at school. You can search any topic to get coloring pages, clip art, and photos for school use. Great for notebooking or lapbooking for free!
CLICK HERE to go to the site
SCIENCE TOY MAKER: Mysterious, Kinetic, Noisy, Do-It-Yourself Science Projects that Entice Scientific Investigation
We featured this site in years past, but it just keeps getting better and better as they add dozens more way cool science toys, gadgets and gizmos (both easy & advanced) that you can make at home to demonstrate all sorts of scientific principles. (We especially like the “dolphin ring” video and project!) Bookmark this site and refer to it whenever you want a hands-on toy building project that has scientific value & your kids will love to play with!
Click here to go to the site!
Have you ever heard of Charlotte (Lotte) Reiniger? She was one of the foremost pioneers of hand-cut paper silhouette animation, and produced the very first full length animated feature in Germany in 1923. Her work is finely detailed and truly amazing and captivates young viewers.
The Magic Horse is a beautiful example of Reiniger’s paper silhouette animation. This short film (10 minutes) made in 1953 is a delightful adaptation of the Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Watch it below, or if the video below does not show up on your device, click here to view it on Youtube.
Here’s a delightful collection of 40 colorful and whimsical paper toys designed by Marilyn Scott Waters that are actually fun to make and play with, available to download in PDF format on this neat page from her site, TheToyMaker.com. Just print them out, cut, glue and enjoy!
CLICK HERE to go to the website!
The Common Birds Coloring Book from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology contains terrific line drawings of over 50 common feeder birds. You can download the coloring book and print out pages as you need them, and let your students color the images using a field guide. There are also identification questions on each page to help your students learn to spot these birds in the field.
Most of the pictures in this coloring book were drawn by the noted bird artist and ornithologist, Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1872-1927). Fuertes, a native of Ithaca, New York and a Cornell University graduate, is known for his realistic bird art. Look for his signature initials: L. A. F. The other drawings are by William Montagna, signature initials: W. M. All are gorgeous!
To download the PDF coloring book, CLICK HERE
