We’ve fielded many inquiries lately about instructing children in the arts, which includes the visual arts, music, dance, and drama. While we’re known for our award-winning MCT language arts curriculum, as well as our varied course offerings in the Royal Fireworks Online Learning Community (which include courses in subjects such as drawing and architecture), many people don’t know that we have an arts curriculum as well. Artistic Ways of Knowing, by Joanne Haroutounian, Ph.D., is a comprehensive curriculum for teachers and homeschool co-op instructors who want to offer arts experiences to children of all ages and grades, ability levels, and backgrounds.

The curriculum consists of a set of three books, which are companion texts but which can each stand alone. Together, they offer the elements of theory and practice so that not only can you understand the artistic experience as explained in Artistic Ways of Knowing, you can use Think Like an Artist to help bring it to children who can then also understand it, but on a much deeper level than what is typically taught in many schools today—when it is taught at all. The third book, Arts Talent ID, offers helpful information and forms to assist in the identification of students who show the promise of talent in a given art form.

These books help adults to nurture children’s budding talent in the arts, but also to encourage students to explore their artistic abilities and cultivate their interests. After all, we can’t all become the next Picasso or Pavarotti or Gelsey Kirkland or Nathan Lane, but we can learn about art and music and dancing and theater acting so that we can appreciate the talent that we do see, and we can have fun practicing our skills in any of those areas as well, even if we never rise to the level of what anyone else would call “good.”

The Artistic Ways of Knowing arts curriculum is a valuable (and beautiful) set of books for anyone who wants to develop talent or the appreciation for talent in children. Check out the specific details of each book and of the set, and then give a child—or a room full of children—the gift of cultivating and nurturing a talent in the arts.