Books (More Books)

Last month I linked a list of great books for the elementary classroom. Today I stumbled across EduGuide's Annotated Bibliography of Art Books for K12 Grades. I love reading and all students seem to enjoy reading books about art, especially when starting out a new unit.

Great Books for the Elementary Art Classroom

I recently came across this list of 76 great books for the elementary art classroom. The woman I student taught with suggested starting a lesson with a culture (Africa, Inuit, China), an artist (VanGogh, Matisse), or a book. Books are also used to supplement the first two choices, so this list should come in handy for anybody teaching elementary art.

 

Beautiful Oops

A colleague of mine recommended A Beautiful Oops by Barney Saltzberg  after we taught our Saturday art class. Her unit was about "play" where her students were to imagine a place that they would like to play and then they built it using shoeboxes and and other mixed media. It turned out really cool. This book helped her students free themselves from the constraints of "right" and "wrong." It shows young kids that it's ok to make mistakes, that a "mistake is an adventure in creativity, a portal of discovery."

Alphabeasties!

The end of the semester and and the holidays turns November and December into a blur. I'm super excited to finish up my last semester of classes before student teaching. They're really interesting and I really hope I can get everything done the way I want before the end of the semester.

While studying at the library, I found this clever book called Alphabeasties and other AmaZing Types by Sharon Werner and Sarah Foss.

 It's a flip book with an animal illustrated in one letter for each letter of the alphabet. The letters are then turned into a couple smaller illustrations using the different cases and different fonts to showcase something else about the letter. This is definitely geared toward lower elementary students if you're reinforcing the alphabet, however, one could easily show this to even high school age students and ask them to pick a letter and created a type-based illustration. The content and design of this book is very cool and worth taking a peek. I love it and the kids do too!

20th Century Fashion

While checking out books in the kids section of my local library, I stumbled upon a series called 20th Century Fashion.

I found the following six books: 1900-10s, 20s & 30s, 40s & 50s, 60s, 70s, and the 80s & 90s. Here is the library summary:

20th Century Fashion is a time capsule of clothing for every decade from the 1900s through the 1990s. This exciting series presents style and design as they relate to the world events, people, politics, social change, and technology of each era. Dynamic text and colorful images, along with a fashion time line that places clothing design alongside other world events, capture the glamour and artistry of fashion.

They’re perfect for junior high school students. The layout is great, it includes lots of pictures, and I love the inclusion of world history and technology from that era. There is also a companion series about 20th century design that is on my list to check out in the future.