Art History, the big Story approach

As my children are transitioning towards Elementary/Middle School, I am trying to apply some of the Montessori Elementary principles to what we do, going from manipulative/concrete to abstract and big picture.

This approach is working particularly well in the study of Art. Rather than approaching different techniques in random order, we are following a small booklet, "The Child's History of Painting", which is a simplified narration of the evolution of art, with plenty of activities related to each moment.

It gives children the big picture, in the same way "The History of the Hand" and "The History of Writing" do in the Five Great Lessons, and it helps them understand art in context, within its historical times.

I  usually start with the activities suggested in the book, but I also like to incorporate my own.

Here is an example of a fun activity we came up with, in which we combined history, art and a little bit of craftsmanship by a cool DIY scratch art paper medium.


The subject is Ancient Greece, more especifically the Red Figure and Black Figure in pottery.

In order to reproduce the effect, we simply created a scratch paper using only red orange crayon for the Red figure  and use red orange card stock for the Black Figure.

The Red -figure inspired vases

The Black-Figure inspired vases

When placed side by side, the effect is quite striking, and it helps understand the details involved in the change of background for each style.

Writing in Ancient Egypt

For our second lesson in the history of writing, we focus on Egypt. First we made some natural dyes using only plant material.(These dyes can be used for other historical periods- even for prehistoric art)

These are the materials used:

Hot pink: Red rose petals

Green: Spinach (is a brownish green)

Yellow: Curry powder

The process is similar for all of them:

Collect the material, chop it fine (if needed), place in a saucepan and put enough water just to cover it. Boil for 15 min, then simmer until liquid has reduced to half. Strain.

For the other three colors we used black beans.

Lilac: Place half a cup of black beans in a bowl, and put enough water to cover them by an inch. Let it sit all night. That’s it.

Purple: Use the same process as in the lilac color, but add white vinegar to it. Reduce to half.

Dark Brown: Cook the beans in some water. Strain.

We also made our own “papyrus” paper, by cutting strips of construction paper and waving them. We use school glue generously all over it, to obtain a single sheet.

After it was dry, we wrote my son’s name in hieroglyphs. This site has a very neat “translator” where you can input any name and it will give you the “equivalent”. 

As a side project, we dyed some cotton yarn, to explore how the ancients may have "put some color" into their clothes. We got this sample page, that helps us documenting our hard work :)

It was a very interesting, hands on project!

The history of writing

This is our first activity in the series “the history of writing”. We are following along the history units of the history of civilization, focusing on a “hands on” approach to the subject of handwriting, as emphasized in Maria Montessori’s “Five great Lessons”.

In this particular activity we replicate “cuneiform writing” developed by the Sumerians around the 30th century BC.

These are the materials we used

-          A wooden dowel, one end shaped as a wedge

-          A print of the cuneiform alphabet

-          A package of crayola magic model sculpey (any type of modeling clay would work)
- A small cutting board

-          A tray to contain all the materials.

After a brief introduction and explanation, we explore together the cuneiform signs, noting that they are basically composed of two shapes repeated and combined so as to form all the letters needed for their language.

After practicing this two shapes on the clay, we smooth it again and my DS suggested trying to write his on name on it. 

We left it to air dry and continue discussing how the storage of these tables would have been. We ended the activity by watching some pictures of actual tablets. (found here)