Review: ArtArchieve

We love ArtAchieve! We had the opportunity to review their product last year, and were so excited to get the opportunity to review Entire Level II this year. My kids find these art projects just SO FUN, and they beg to let this be on the agenda for school each day. 
My husband was a graphic designer and an artist before he changed careers, so you would think art would be easy to incorporate in our house. But for some reason, this part of our homeschooling often gets put on the back burner. 
Enter ArtAchieve! In the Entire Level II edition, there are FIFTEEN different art lessons for your child to participate in. Each of these assignments gives you a:

• Description
• List of Supplies for each student
• Suggestions for Cross-Curricular Connections
• Approximate Time to complete the Art Class

I want to take a moment to highlight the third bullet point above: Suggestions for Cross-Curricular Connections. This list provides several different opportunities to incorporate the art your child is doing into more of a "whole learning" approach. There are suggestions as to how you can mix this lesson with other subjects like geography, history, writing, literature, music, science, and even cooking!
You can view each project via PowerPoint or video. I found some of my kids preferred going through the slides and others like to watch the videos. Sometimes I let my kids go through the lessons on their own, and other times I would actually go through the slides and read them to the kiddos as you see me do in the video below.
We took the time to do quite a few of these projects, and trust me, we will keep going after I submit his review. But I wanted to focus this review on the one that was our favorite: The German Nutcracker.  
We actually did this project when our friends were in town. This left six kiddos to participate! Here is a video of the kids starting on their projects. The ages ranged from 5-10!
This lesson is an introduction to body proportions and how to use the head as a way to keep the proportions correct. We divided up our paper into quadrants to help with this. And it really worked well! You could see the difference in abilities and understanding between the kids who were in the lower ages and the older ages as they interpreted and worked on these nutcrackers. 

The project actually called for the students to finish their projects with acrylic paints. However, after they were finished drawing, each of the kids wanted to do something different. Some wanted to paint, but one wanted to use glitter pens on her nutcracker. Here is what she did:

Another one of the kiddos just waned to leave his with the pencil outline:

You can purchase each of the art units independently for $5 a lesson, or you can purchase the Entire Level II for just over $55.00. This is a one year license which means you can do the projects more than one time. 

Folks this is a fantastic program, and I strongly encourage you to give it a try. You can try one lesson completely for free so you have nothing to lose. And as always, if you have any questions or want more information, please shoot me an email at: wkitsteiner@gmail.com.