Spotty Blue Banana

Artcyclopedia is a site that allows you to search through thousands of artists to find links to museums, image archives, books, etc. to find out more about the artists, to view images of their works, etc.

Crayola is perhaps best known for making crayons. But their website has some great resources and ideas to help with your kids creative side. There is ‘fun and games’ where kids can drag and drop elements onto a ‘page’ and then print it out for colouring, as well as other stuff.

However, I want to specifically concentrate on two zones, namely ‘for educators’ and ‘for parents’.

The ‘for eductors’ has lesson plans via a search option to enable structured art working. I particularly found the Art Tips and Techniques section in Resources useful.

And ‘for parents’ there are lists of arts and crafts you can try out with your children; colouring activities to do, wordsearches, cursive writing practise sheets to print off, and lots more.

The site is well worth a visit, either the US site (.com) or other countries, including the UK site (.co.uk).

Smarthistory is an interesting site (historically categorized into different periods) that not only displays images of over 200 art works, but have well informed, engaging discussions as embedded audio.

Based in San Francisco, the Exploratorium was founded by the famous physicist and educator Dr Frank Oppenheiner, who remained the director until his death in 1985.

I’ll be visiting the site again, and again and probably again; it’s got to great stuff on there.

However, today I’m interested in the After School section, which “brings hands on activities and digital library resources into afterschool play”.

There are well presented instructional videos telling you how to create the activity, how to engage children in the activity, and how to vary things and investigate the results.