Our Connections to the Curriculum

May 11, 2022

Artwork for primary school children's curriculum. Colourful drawings and paintings.

Our website - online art lessons for teachers and parents to use with kids

Artventure has many sides to it, evolving over the years based on the needs of our members and feedback from the community. Starting as an online environment full of videos encouraging children to draw, this grew to include lessons for teens as well. We never stop learning and our children, having loved the videos as youngsters, wanted more! Their skills had improved, they’d moved into secondary education and they wanted to take more control of their personal art development. So Artventure continued to improve and support children in their artistic endeavours but out of this grew Art Eye Deer - more advanced lessons, particularly for teens. However, Artventure is the founding business and so with this new website, the elements of the original Artventure for early learners and the newer element of Art Eye Deer for more advanced artists, have been combined in the one place: www.artventure.com.au. Each element has its own rich and diverse collection of video art lessons, and new ones will continue to be added over time. Membership can be for just one of the Libraries or both.

Blog Authors

Our blogs, on the other hand, are for anyone and everyone. They do not require membership! They are published each month and aim to enrich the creativity of learners and teachers. There are several authors but I tend to write the blogs to support Artventure, for the early learners. Wendy writes the blogs to support Art Eye Deer. You can see our bios under TEAM on the website.

Blogs supporting Artventure Library

When I write my blogs for Artventure, the audience I have in mind might be parents, grandparents, teachers, homeschoolers, and other educators supporting children develop their artistic and creative skills. Some of you may just be interested in how to embed art ideas into a wet weekend, a holiday to the beach or a stint in isolation. Others may be trying to homeschool for the first time and would appreciate suggestions on how to enrich lessons with visual representations. Maybe you are a classroom teacher and would like to incorporate artworks and diagrams in your lessons, or you need to plan visual art lessons and feel some new ideas might be good.

Having been a teacher of primary school aged children for over 40 years, the generalist approach where learning is transdisciplinary across curriculum areas means I like to write about diverse topics - sometimes current (like when we had the bushfires), sometimes I try to draw on different areas of learning in the curriculum (‘Growing with Change’ - Health & PE). I’ve also written blogs about creating a Visual Arts Curriculum for home and using cheap art supplies. These are all accessible to anybody through the website.

For members, obviously engaging in Artventure lessons, achievements and outcomes indicated in The Arts curriculum: Visual Arts will invariably be covered. Sometimes this is the focus. But often the development of artistic skills, knowledge and attitudes will grow even when the attention in a particular lesson is on another curriculum area. Key aspects of the Visual Arts curriculum are artmaking and reflecting and this is encouraged in every lesson here. The focus skills in the Artventure Library of lessons are mainly drawing and painting, with some additional techniques incorporated, rather than the full gamut of skills in the Visual Arts curriculum. Having said that, basic drawing skills are as essential to learning as being able to read, write and work with numbers. And THAT is at the core, the heart, of Artventure!

Each Artventure lesson is linked to one curriculum area. The intention of this is to show how art can be embedded in all our learning. Naturally any one Artventure lesson can be used to support different study areas you may be working on. For example, the ‘Happy Lion’ is connected to the English curriculum - stories about lions. But the ‘African Lion Landscape’ is connected to the Humanities and Social Sciences: Geography curriculum. Both could just as easily be used in a Science lesson.

The LEARNING NOTES in each lesson aim to link an artwork to an area of the curriculum but are just ideas to stimulate discussion with your children and encourage further inquiry. For those needing to add the relevant outcomes for their teaching notes, descriptions and elaborations have been included. The indicated year levels are also just a guide. The art lessons can be used by any age for any purpose.

So, anyone can read through the BLOGS. However, if then, as a member, you consider the LEARNING NOTES for lessons mentioned, there are bountiful possibilities for incorporating Artventure into the curriculum - or just engaging your kids in a fun Saturday afternoon activity, with leading questions and anecdotal points of interest to build their knowledge!

Blogs supporting Art Eye Deer Library

Wendy’s Art Eye Deer blogs serve a different purpose and I love reading them! As a secondary art teacher, her audience might be teachers like herself but, more likely, the readers are teenagers enriching their visual arts journey.

For members, the Art Eye Deer Library of lessons is intended to support The Visual Arts curriculum for Years 7 to 12, or any learners with more advanced artistic abilities. These blogs can support students with various requirements of the curriculum. For the benefit of teachers as much as learners, the Art Eye Deer lessons are linked to genres, mediums and concepts. Useful notes come under the headings of FOCUS, DETAILS and RESPONDING.

Together

Our blogs appear as a mixture and hopefully add depth, colour and perspective to the already rich array of artwork lessons offered here! They are our opinions and thoughts shared in the hope that we can raise awareness about all sorts of arty ideas, and that Artventure lessons will make a difference in the creative lives of our young ones.