Crayons Can Help You Teach Art Lessons

by Spramani Elaun

Hello my friends,

This blog kicks off my fun crayon series. Besure you read all the other ones that follow this blog. I’m excited to share ways you can breath life into your old crayons. Crayons Can Help You Teach Art Lessons!

Crayons helped me understand my art teaching flaws

I know this sounds strange to hear. But…crayons did help me see my teaching flaws. Let me give you some background about me. I was a hot mess trying to figure out my art studio when I first started out. I tried teaching art like I learned in design college. I would set up paint, canvases, and still life prompts for my students to paint and draw. It took a couple of years for me to realize that I was skipping important art foundation lessons. I came to realize my students needed simpler lessons first!

I also used to believe my students had to have super fancy mediums to be artful. Over decades of teaching art lessons I came to understand one important rule to teaching art. My students needed basic isolated lessons on art elements one at a time.

Now thirty years later I’ve got it all figured out!

I’ve come full circle and now I understand those building block lessons can be with any basic art medium. A pencil, eraser, pencil sharpener or box of crayons!

So you can actually teach many foundational skill sets with $2.00 pack crayons…seriously! As my two young adult children say all the time to me “facts mom!”.

Crayon lessons am I talking about:

• Learning how to draw different lines
• Learning how to trace
• How to create textures
• Color theory like; warm colors, cool colors and complementary colors
• Geometric shapes
• How to make a color value scale

So if you thought you had to start teaching real art lessons with a fancy budget you’re wrong. It’s fun with those mediums, but not necessary.

Ok, this newsletter is kicking off my crayons series. I’ll share what some of these fun art lessons look like in a few days. Stay tuned!

P.S. Finally my DRAWING curriculum is done! I’m so excited to share this news. For both early childhood and upper and elementary grades. You can order the early childhood curriculum now, and pre-order the elementary at a discount (delivers May 2nd. 2023).

Learn/Order my new drawing curriculum HERE

Drawing Elementary Paperback

Drawing Elementary Digital

Drawing Early Childhood paperback

Drawing Early Childhood Digital

Best Children’s Drawing Art Supplies | What to buy

All rights reserved © 2023, Nature of Art®

No part of this blog may be used or be reproduced in any manner whatsoever including reproducing, publishing, performing, and making any adaptions of the work – including translation into another foreign language without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Nature of Art® Publishing P.O. Box 443 Solana Beach, California 92075.