Art has been my thing since I was a kid in Brooklyn. I studied it all through high school, I planned a whole career around it, and I have been teaching my own children art history since they were small. So I do not get starry-eyed over an art curriculum easily. This one got me.
I was flipping through the Book of Artists, the thick anthology at the heart of Beautiful Feet Books Art Appreciation, and I landed on a full two-page spread for Frida Kahlo. Coyoacán, México. Her face, her brow, her parrot, the whole arc of her life. A Mexican woman given the same space and the same weight as Leonardo and Rembrandt. I sat on my couch longer than I needed to. Then I kept turning and found Pablo Picasso, Horace Pippin, and Harriet Powers, and I understood this was not the same old canon on repeat.
Here is why that combination matters to me. The practical reason: I have a teen and a tween, four years apart, and one of me, and I had never found a single art program structured enough to teach both at once without building it myself. The personal reason: I know what it does to a kid to never see themselves in the beautiful things they are taught to admire. This homeschool art appreciation curriculum is the first one I have used that answered both at the same time. And when I brought it home, both my kids got genuinely excited, paging through it, which does not happen with every box that lands on our table.
Why I am picky about art curriculum, and said yes to this one
If you have ever felt unqualified to teach art, let me reassure you first: you do not need a degree, because a good homeschool art appreciation curriculum hands you the artist, the artwork, the historical context, and the questions to ask. That is the entire point of a structured program.
My barrier was never the love or the knowledge. It was time. With a teen and a tween four years apart, I did not want to run two separate art tracks or stitch together a homeschool fine arts elective from scratch every single week. I wanted one beautiful, structured homeschool art history curriculum I could open and teach to both kids together. That is what Beautiful Feet Books built, and after forty years of making literature-based curriculum, it shows.
What actually comes in the box
No mystery boxes, because that is the fastest way to lose me. Here is exactly what arrives:
- One Art Appreciation Teacher Guide, the spine that walks you through lesson by lesson
- One Book of Artists, a hardcover anthology introducing ninety-one artists
- One consumable Art Notebook for your student’s written narration and responses
- One Art Card Pack with 36 art cards, the actual images you study together
- One downloadable Resource Packet, accessible through a QR code printed inside the teacher guide
It is structured as a two-year study, 64 lessons, roughly one lesson a week, written for grades 5 through 12. The price at the time of writing is $109.95 for the whole study, which, for two years of one-and-done prep covering both my kids, is a number I can defend on a single income.
Each lesson follows a simple rhythm: Read, Discuss, Record, and Play, with optional Explore and Rabbit Trails sections when you want to go deeper. The Read is almost always from the Book of Artists. The Discuss prompts are intentionally open-ended. The Record sends your student to the Art Notebook. The Play is a hands-on activity. There is even a links page, accessed by scanning a QR code on the lesson, that points you to vetted videos and articles. In Lesson 37 on Utagawa Hiroshige, that link led us to an Asian Art Museum video on Hokusai and Hiroshige, which is exactly the kind of rabbit trail I never would have found on my own.
One purchase, one prep, two ages at one table
This is the part that sold the practical side of my brain.
Art Appreciation is intentionally built as a family study. It is not a workbook you photocopy, so each kid does their own page in separate corners of the house. Everyone sits down with the same Book of Artists, the same 36 art cards, and the same questions. Take Lesson 50: the whole family reads about Edvard Munch and Käthe Kollwitz, pulls Card 32 (Munch’s The Scream), and talks through the same prompts together. What catches your eye first? How do the colors make you feel? Then each kid records in their own Art Notebook at their own level.
The teacher guide says this out loud in a section called Teaching Multiple Levels: when you have children at a range of levels, the whole family can enjoy the Read and Discuss portions together, with the youngest aiming for exposure rather than mastery. That is the entire premise of my homeschool, validated in the curriculum’s own words.
In practice, my teen takes the discussion further, writes longer responses, ties an artist to the history we are already studying, and can log the work as a homeschool fine arts elective credit toward high school. My tween sits at the same table, looks at the same painting, and answers the same question at their own level. One purchase. One prep. Both kids are learning. If you have three or four kids spread across a wide age range, this is not a philosophical nicety. It is the difference between art happening and art getting skipped again.
The part that moved me: a cast of artists my kids can see themselves in
I expected the canon, and the canon is here: Leonardo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Vermeer. What I did not expect was how many other faces shared the room. Frida Kahlo. Pablo Picasso. Horace Pippin, a self-taught Black painter who served with the Harlem Hellfighters in World War I, the longest-serving US regiment in that war, whose painting The Ending of the War: Starting Home grew out of what he survived in the trenches. Gordon Parks, the Black photographer and filmmaker behind the iconic American Gothic charwoman portrait and the film Shaft. Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, two women Abstract Expressionists given a full spread side by side. An entire lesson on Hiroshige and the Japanese prints that reshaped European art. And Harriet Powers, the African American quilt artist, whose story was a wonderful discovery for all of us.
I notice my family leans toward the modern artists, and I think it is because that is where we see ourselves most clearly. That pull is the whole reason I seek out diversity when I learn and when I teach. It is not a box to check. Diversity is how you get the in-depth stories, the more accurate picture of what life was actually like, and the range of perspectives that make a subject worth studying. My kids love learning about other people and other cultures, and not in a skin-deep way. It genuinely does not matter to them whether an artist is white, tan, brown, Black, or Asian. They want the human story underneath.
Ninety-one artists in all, including what the book itself calls lesser-known pioneers from around the world. Is it still weighted toward the Western tradition? Yes. But it is noticeably more inclusive than most classic art curricula I have shelved over the years, and for my family, that changes the whole experience. My kids are not visiting a museum where everyone on the wall is a stranger. Some of those faces look like them, and the rest open a door to someone new.
Representation is not a bonus feature in a homeschool art curriculum. For a kid who has never seen themselves on the wall, it is the whole lesson.
An honest word for my secular families
You trust me to tell you what is actually inside before you spend $110, so here is the straight talk.
Beautiful Feet Books writes from a faith-friendly perspective, and you will feel it in a few places. Lesson 25 pairs a Rembrandt painting with the parable of the rich fool and invites you to read Luke 12. The teacher’s guide to the essay on nudity in art is grounded in a Christian view of the body, and the book intentionally leaves out artwork containing nudity, marking those works with an asterisk so you can decide for your own family. The introduction connects the human urge to create to the idea of the imago dei (image of God).
If you run a secular home as I do, none of that has to be a wall. The whole program is designed to be adapted. The guide says plainly that you will not complete every part and should never feel pressure to. The Discuss prompts are open-ended by design, so when a lesson leans scriptural, we either reframe the question around emotion, history, and technique, or we skip it and keep moving. The art history underneath is sturdy and stands on its own. I would rather hand you the full picture now than have you discover it after checkout, and knowing all of that, this still earns its place on my shelf.
The Charlotte Mason picture study tradition, with structure added
If you have spent any time in homeschool circles, you know the phrase Charlotte Mason picture study: you put a single work of art in front of your kids, you look at it closely and quietly, and then you talk about what you noticed. It is beautiful, and for a lot of us, it is also where things fall apart, because “now go look at art” is not a plan.
What Beautiful Feet Books does well is keep the heart of that picture study tradition, the slow looking and the real conversation, while handing you the scaffolding underneath it. The cards give you the image. The Book of Artists gives you the story. The teacher’s guide gives you the questions. You bring the family. That structure is what turns picture study from a someday intention into a Tuesday morning that actually happens.
One honest note on the Art Notebook
I promised honesty, so here it is. The Art Notebook leans heavily toward written narration and response. It is built for your student to write about what they observed, not as a sketchbook for free drawing. That fits the Charlotte Mason narration philosophy, and for my teen, it is genuinely useful writing practice. But if you have a kid whose whole heart is in making art, set expectations early and pair the notebook with a cheap blank sketchbook so they have somewhere to draw. It is a five-dollar fix, and worth knowing going in.
Six ways to extend Art Appreciation into a real homeschool experience
The curriculum stands on its own, but a little extension is where the learning sticks. Here are low-prep ways to stretch it across mixed ages:
- Bake the Mondrian cookies. The teacher guide includes an actual recipe for red, blue, yellow, and black-icing grid cookies that pairs perfectly with the Mondrian art card in Lesson 50. Art history you can eat is a guaranteed win, and it photographs beautifully if you share your homeschool online. Do an art tea time, think poetry tea time with art.
- Use the free museum programs the guide hands you. The teacher guide points families to Museums 4 All free admission for SNAP recipients, Bank of America’s free first full weekend each month, and library museum passes. Here in NYC, that opens the Met, MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum. Standing in front of the real painting after reading about the artist hits completely differently.
- Build a family artist timeline. Tape a long strip of paper down a hallway and add each artist as you study them. Your older kid handles dates and movements, your younger one draws a tiny version of the artwork. Same project, two levels.
- Try an artist’s actual technique. Studying Frankenthaler, thin your paint and let it soak into unprimed paper. Studying a sculptor, pull out the clay. Reviewers especially loved the optional stained-glass craft built into the program.
- Host a family gallery night. At the end of a unit, let each kid pick a favorite from the 36 cards, prop them around the living room, and give a one-minute tour. Low effort, surprisingly memorable, and it turns a quiet observation into a real conversation.
- Add an artist from your own family’s heritage. The book gives you ninety-one to start. Go find one more who looks like your kids, research them together, and add a page to the notebook. This is the extension I care about most, because the goal was never just to admire art. It was to help my kids see themselves inside it.
Want a no-pressure way to start this week? I made you a free printable titled “Artists Worth Knowing: A Family Art Appreciation Pack.” Inside, you get a discovery checklist of 20 artists worth knowing, Frida and Harriet Powers included, a reusable picture-study page, and family discussion prompts that work whether your kid is five or fifteen.
Free Download
Artists Worth Knowing: A Family Art Appreciation Pack.
Where to start, and a free shipping code
If art appreciation has been sitting on your someday list, this is a clean way to finally move it onto the real one. You can see everything that comes with the Art Appreciation family study here.
Use code IHN26FS for free shipping on US orders through the end of July 2026.
