Art

About this course

Second grade art assumes your student can already draw lines and shapes and pushes into the next layer. The drawing unit turns flat circles and squares into shaded spheres and cubes, sets up a still life to draw from life, works on animals from observation, gives the standing figure a real proportion rule (about six to seven heads tall, knees halfway down), introduces perspective and how distant things shrink, and ends by building a full scene with a foreground, middle ground, and background. Color theory goes past mixing into the color wheel itself, with analogous colors that sit as neighbors and complementary colors that sit across from each other, plus tints, shades, and a closing lesson on the rainbow as God's covenant sign to Noah. The painting unit is genuinely technical for this age: flat watercolor washes, wet-on-wet, dry brush on rough paper, sponge texture, controlled splatter, pointillism after Georges Seurat, opaque tempera, layered glazes, and a Holy Land landscape that pulls it all together.

Sculpture is the most hands-on unit, covering homemade salt dough baked hard in the oven, papier-mache built over an armature, origami, cardboard tube construction, bent aluminum wire figures, pinch pots, coil pots, and building with sticks, stones, and pine cones, then a free-choice final piece. Mixed media works through cut collage, torn paper, nature collage, newspaper collage, fabric and burlap, cardboard construction from recycling, white-crayon wax resist under a watercolor wash, and glowing layers of tissue paper. The art history unit runs from cave painting through Egypt, Greece and Rome, illuminated manuscripts, the Renaissance, American folk art, modern art, and Christian art from the catacombs to stained glass. Two of those lessons are worth knowing about in advance: the Greek and Roman lesson mentions marble statues of gods and answers it with Paul at Athens in Acts 17, and the modern art lesson introduces Kandinsky and Mondrian while saying plainly that some modern art moved away from faith.

The course is 72 lessons in eight units, about 25 minutes each, and it is a light subject rather than a daily one. Units seven and eight repeat the drawing and color units, so there are 54 different lessons and a deliberate second pass through the fundamentals. Each lesson has three parts on the page: a paragraph explaining the technique, a short paragraph tying it to Scripture, and a clearly written project with real steps. Then comes a ten-question quiz that grades itself, and it asks about the project as well as the concept. No artwork images are included, so keep a book or a screen nearby for the history lessons. Supplies go well beyond the crayons, paper, scissors, and glue that the lessons list. Across the year you will want watercolor and tempera paint, two or three brushes, a sponge, cotton swabs, flour and salt and an oven for the dough, acrylic paint to finish it, air-dry clay for the pots, aluminum craft wire, origami paper, newspaper, cardboard tubes and boxes, fabric scraps, tissue paper, white glue, and a white crayon. This is a making course much more than a reading course, and it will need a table you do not mind getting messy.

What the course covers

• Shading spheres, cubes, and cylinders
• Still life, observation drawing, and human proportion
• Perspective, depth, and foreground to background
• The color wheel, analogous and complementary colors
• Watercolor wash, wet-on-wet, dry brush, and glazing
• Pointillism, splatter, and sponge techniques
• Salt dough, papier-mache, wire, and coil and pinch pots
• Collage, wax resist, and tissue paper overlay
• Art history from cave painting to modern art
• Christian art, illuminated manuscripts, and stained glass

What your student will be able to do

• Shade a drawing so flat shapes look round and solid
• Use a color wheel to pick harmonious or contrasting color schemes
• Control watercolor and tempera with several different brush techniques
• Build and finish a three-dimensional piece in clay, dough, wire, or paper
• Combine two or more materials into one planned mixed-media artwork
• Identify major periods of art history and what each is known for

Scope and sequence

All 8 units of Art for Grade 2, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 72 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 72 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.