Art History - Ancient Art

Cave paintings are the focus of our Ancient Art studies.  We begin by reading books (see the list below), looking up some real cave paintings images worldwide, and working on a simple wall art project.

Resources

We read these books in line with our cave art lessons.

Stone Age. A beautiful book about the people living during the Stone Age. This is part of the history book that we have from this set.

The First Dog.  A fictional story about a boy who met a Paleowolf on his way home.  As the story progressed, you will see how the boy tamed the wolf and became the first tamed animal.  There are cave drawings on the sides of this book that made it special.  Vito and I would decode what those drawings are all about and how they relate to the story.  Vito loves this book and kept asking to read it to him over and over again.

Discovery in the Cage.  This is the story of how the cave paintings were discovered in France by four boys. I personally love this book, and Vito enjoyed this as well. I love how they showed the entire map of the Lascaux cave (huge!), so enlightening!

Stone Age Boy.  A delightful story about a boy falling into a hole and woke up at a different time (stone age).  

We also looked into some pictures on the web, and I printed some of Vito's favourites for reference.

Activities

I set up a "cave wall" in our kitchen bar using brown paper.  We used oil pastels for our drawings. Vito asked what should he draw.  I told him to pretend to be a cave dweller, and what do you want to do when you want to write on the cave instead of a journal? At first, he decided to record the day, starting with tracing his hand, then telling about the rain outside, the rainbow and eventually how the sun showed up.

He later moved to draw a superhero (that's him) and how he's flying in the sky :D

We will be moving to Medieval Arts or Renaissance, depending on the available resources that we have.

This unit was a hit.  Vito's really interested in those cave paintings and how the cave dwellers made those with no modern-day paints at all. 

Next... Medieval Arts/Renaissance!

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