PHS Review

Beginner, K-2; Intermediate, grades 3 and 4; and Advanced, grades 5-8.
Any one level, $85; any two levels, $136; all three levels, $165.
PHS readers can take $10 off by entering code MTM045 at online checkout.
Needed art supplies, around $28.
MeettheMasters.com. 866-686-4278. Fax: (949) 481-8566.
Web: www.meetthemasters.com.

It started as a public-school program based on slide shows and art
technique lessons that so far has been used by over a million
schoolchildren. It has morphed into a homeschool curriculum that
comes in binders with a CD-ROM.

What is it? It's Meet the Masters.

This program is quite simply the answer for those who'd like to teach
art but never have the time. In just a couple hours per afternoon,
one afternoon a month, for seven months, you can now introduce your
children to the work and techniques of seven major artists. When the
entire curriculum has been converted to this format, you'll be able
to cover 28 artists, many of whom rank among the most influential
artists of all time.

The curriculum is designed for three different age levels. If you
have children in different age groups, you'll have to buy two or
three levels of the curriculum. Happily, there's a discount for doing
so, as you'll only get (and need) one copy of the CD-ROM.
Don't get confused about the different "levels" of this course. All
cover the same artists, but with scripts and activities aimed at
different age groups. I personally found the differences in the
scripts to be minimal, which is good, because there's no reason to
give younger children a seriously dumbed-down version of the artist's
lives. The activities, however, differ noticeably as to the amount of
skill required.

Setup couldn't be simpler. First, order the very few basic supplies
needed from your local art shop or from the huge art store (over
40,000 items in stock!) at meetthemasters.com. Then for each Master
Artist unit you go through these three steps:

1. Insert the CD-ROM into your computer's drive. Read the
programmed script in the curriculum binder as you click along with
the slide show of famous artworks and important photos and
illustrations relevant to the artist's life (yes, it's on a computer
but this program still is true to its slide-show roots). During this
presentation, which reveals the artist's feelings about his art as
well as facts about his life and times, you will be asking your
children the questions given in the script. In some units and some
levels, the children also "act out" a facet of the artist's life
(e.g., putting on a straw hat with unlit candles on it to simulate
how van Gogh found enough light to paint by night before the advent
of electricity-and how he got some painful burns!). When you're done,
your children will answer the interactive quiz questions on the CD-ROM.

2. Time to practice the new artistic technique for this lesson!
For van Gogh, your child is shown how to apply textures to outline
drawings and given a number of these outlines to fill in with
specific textures (e.g., tree bark, leaves, crosshatch . . .)

3. Now it's time for the "Create Your Own Masterpiece" activity.
For van Gogh, your child will use oil pastel on black construction
paper to recreate a simplified version of his famous painting "Starry
Night." Naturally, this recreation gets more sophisticated as the
level advances from Beginning through Intermediate to Advanced.
You need absolutely no art background to teach this course. But even
if you think you have an art background, prepare for surprises! I've
read dozens of books about art and artists over the years, and worn
out shoe leather in several major art museums, yet almost from the
start this course was telling me memorable facts about some of my
favorite artists that I had never known.

The package for Year One (so far, the only year available in the
homeschool/ CD-ROM format) includes:
* CD-ROM with 103 color slides divided into seven Master Artist
Units, each with an interactive game or final quiz; five music
selections; and eight "artist voice selections" (actually, someone
else reading the dead artists' words in English). Pierre, the Meet
the Masters cartoon character, cavorts through the quizzes.
* Curriculum binder. This introduces the curriculum and the
CD-ROM. It includes reproducible (within your family) student work
pages and tabbed teaching instructions for each of the seven Master
Artist Units, right down to the exact words you are to say for each
visual on the screen. Award certificates for each Master Artist unit,
artist profile strips, and an outline of the complete four-year
program are also included.
* Seven Master Artist Prints (color prints of artworks)
* Four Mondrian Balancing Shapes (Beginner level only)
* One Winslow Homer Small Print and Tracing Paper (Advanced only)
The art supplies you'll need for the activities are oil pastels,
chalk pastels, colored chalk, tempera paint, art pencils, markers,
crayons, colored tissue paper, construction paper, and paint brushes.
You'll also need a few common household items, such as paper towels.
Here are the artists and techniques studied in Year One:

ARTIST TECHNIQUE
Preview Looking Carefully
Vincent Van Gogh Texture
Mary Cassatt Portraits
Piet Mondrian Balance
Pablo Picasso Composition
Claude Monet Color
Winslow Homer Value

Future years will cover Rosa Bonheur, Alexander Calder, Paul Cezanne,
Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Katsushika Hokusai & the
Asian Brush, Frida Kahlo, Paul Klee, Jacob Lawrence, Henry Matisse,
Joan Miro, Georgia O'Keefe, Rembrandt, Frederick Remington, Pierre
Renoir, Faith Ringgold, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrew Wyeth. As you can see, this is a
multicultural list. Impressionist and modern painters are
overrepresented compared to Renaissance and classical artists,
probably because the artists selected are more accessible to children
than some of the greats of the past, and possibly also because public
schools (for whom this program was originally designed) are not
anxious to study the heavily devotional Christian art of the
centuries before and during the Renaissance and Reformation.

Meet the Masters is by far the easiest to use and most memorable art
appreciation and technique course I've seen. I'd love to see this
format taken further, with some more of these other great artists of
the past, such as Fra Angelica, Michelangelo, and Botticelli. I'd
also like to see all the levels ultimately combined into one book for
each year, which would make it more affordable and less cumbersome
when you're teaching children of different age levels. But what I'm
really waiting for right now is just . . . Year Two!

Recommended. 4 1/2 Stars