10 Easy Ways to Incorporate Art into Your Homeschool Day

Sketch pads, chalk pastels, and watercolor paints aren’t usually considered standard supplies for covering subjects like language arts, history, science, and math, but these things are just as important as having pencils, paper, and curriculum on hand in our homeschool.

You see, my kids love experimenting with art, but we don’t always have time for a big art project in our homeschool day.  That’s led me to get creative and find ways to work art into our other subjects.  Here are ten easy ways you can incorporate art into your homeschool day.   

1. During your read-aloud times, have your kids sketch a character or scene while you read.  This gives them something to keep their hands busy and is a great way to encourage listening.
2. In your history lessons, explore the art from the specific area and era you’re covering.  Art reflects society and gives us great opportunities to step back in time and experience history through the eyes of those who lived it.
3. Use an art journal with history lessons in lieu of a timeline to display.  We do this with each lesson and have a dedicated page with the date, title of the lesson, and either a drawing of a person of interest or scene from the lesson.
4. While you’re working on lunch, let your kids spend some time on Art for Kids Hub or Hodgepodge.  These two sites offer fantastic art tutorials for free, but the best part is that most projects require minimal art supplies and supervision.  Being nearby is great, but not necessary in most cases.
5. Art even has a place in math!  My son can’t wait to get to the last page in each Math U See lesson because it usually involves solving math problems in order to complete an art activity.  If your math curriculum doesn’t offer something similar and you’re looking for help integrating art into math, stop by Math Geek Mama for ideas.  
6. Use technology to your advantage.  Between phones, tablets, and other gadgets, there are plenty of ways to let kids get creative with their day-to-day lessons.  Would you believe my son uses his Nintendo DS to animate scenes from our history lessons?
7. There are lots of options for incorporating art into science.  Exploring space? Let your kids use an astronomy tutorial to draw the solar system with chalk pastels.  Studying the animal kingdom? Use clay to create animals from your lessons. You could even get creative and use recycled items to create art projects while discussing environmental science.
8. Nature journaling is another easy way to bring art and science together.  Whether you’re on a nature walk or just spending time in your backyard, your kids can do much more than write about what they’ve observed.  Their observations can also be recorded through art and can be as simple as making leaf rubbings with leaves from your yard.
9. A 3D Pen is a great way to incorporate abstract art into lots of areas in your homeschool.  You can use it to create landmarks for geography, shapes for geometry, and plants for botany.  Younger kids may need some help with this kind of art, but the possibilities are endless!
10.  We’ve found several ways to work art into language arts over the years.  Sketching is a given because it works well with literature or poetry, but that’s not all we do. Sometimes we paint spelling words or write them in sidewalk chalk.  Other times we’ll use comic strips to review sentence types.  For example, my son draws and sets the story as he wishes, but one character must interact with another by asking a question, then the other character must answer with a command, and so on.