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Start studying Arts supplies. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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The Dot

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The Dot Song Motions Guide - Emily Arrow & Peter H. Reynolds

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Activity with language support

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"Chunking" or "Word Grab"

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"Chunking" or "Word Grab"

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Cooperative drawings

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To develop stories and speech

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Edpuzzle video lesson. Make any video your lesson. Take a video and crop it, add your voice or embed questions at any point.

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With famous paintings

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Listening activity

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Vocabulary scaffold

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The Noisy Paintbox

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Follow up activity

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My kids love it when I stop - stop tidying, stop 'doing stuff'. Putting some music on and getting the coloring pens out is a great family activity - a rare moment when you can all be round the table,...

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21st century skills

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Music

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Emily's Blue Period

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Emily's BLUE Period by Cathleen Daly.  Grandma Annii's Storytime

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Using comics and cartoons to motivate young learners.

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Create Your Own Comic Strips Online with MakeBeliefsComix

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We Offer Support and Resources.

From Richard Byrne, editor of Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week -- ''Creating Comics for Comfort'' -- Living in Maine and father of two school-age children, Richard wrote the following item for teachers and students dealing with the terrible tragedy of the recent mass shootings in that state. He thought this an appropriate time to review and use Social and Emotional Learning resources, such as those offered by MakeBeliefsComix.com.

Make Beliefs Comix offers a library of fantastic, free ebooks for SEL. The library hosted by Make Beliefs Comix contains fillable PDFs that you can download for free. The latest addition to that library is 50+ Ways to Talk to Yourself and Find Healing. And for something a bit lighter, take a look at Pet Words: Conversations With Your Animal Friends.

"Here's a video overview of the Make Beliefs Comix ebooks and here's one about how to create comic strips on the Make Beliefs Comix website."

For many LGBTQ+ kids, especially when they're figuring things out, finding accepting spaces online can sometimes feel safer. Seek out creative opportunities and modes of self-expression, with this section in Make Beliefs Comix.

READ ABOUT US IN THE NEW YORK TIMES!

ARTICLE #1: (click on the link below)
MakeBeliefsComix encourages students to create their own visual pandemic diary.

ARTICLE #2: (click on the link below)
One easy way to start playing with ideas is through the free, online tool at MakeBeliefsComix.com.

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Create Comics Online, it's Fun & Free at MakeBeliefsComix!

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Create comics online at MakeBeliefsComix. A fun way educators & parents can empower students to express ideas and stories in comix!

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Art Lessons: Kandinsky Circle Art  Lesson for Elementary Students

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Art with Mati and Dada –  Leonardo Da Vinci | Kids Animated Short Stories in English

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Leonardo Da Vinci is probably best known as the famous artist who painted the ' Mona Lisa', which has hung in the Louvre gallery in Paris for over 200 years.

However he wasn't just a great painter. Da Vinci was also a sculptor, an architect, a poet, a composer, a scientist, a mathematician and an inventor. Wow! It's hard to believe that one man could possibly have that many talents.

Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius and perhaps one of the most remarkable men that has ever lived.

Top 10 facts

1. Leonardo Da Vinci was born near Florence in Italy in 1452.

2. Leonardo's parents were not married. His father, Ser Piero, was a wealthy Florentine lawyer and his mother, Caterina, was a young peasant girl. He spent his early years with his mother but then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle. His father went on to marry four times!

3. Da Vinci was a huge animal lover. He even chose to be a vegetarian, something that was very unusual in those days. He was said to buy animals from the market just so he could set them free from their cages!

4. Leonardo was left handed. But as well as using his left hand to write, he wrote back to front, from right to left across the page which meant that, for many years, people were unable to understand his notes. This kind of 'mirror writing' led people to believe that Da Vinci wanted to keep his ideas secret!

5. Leonardo obviously had an amazing mind but believe it or not he never went to school! Instead he was taught reading, writing and maths at home.

6. The Mona Lisa is a portrait of the wife of a Florentine official. Apparently he ordered music to be played at every sitting so the lady's smile would remain! Little did Da Vinci know that this was to become arguably the world's most famous painting!

7. One of today's most successful figures, Bill Gates, the man behind Microsoft computers, was obviously inspired by Leonardo's mind. He paid a cool 30.8 million dollars for a 500-year-old manuscript written by Da Vinci.

8. Leonardo's surname Da Vinci simply means 'of Vinci', a Tuscan village not far from Florence, which is where his father's family took their name.

9. There are actually two versions of Da Vinci's famous painting The Virgin of the Rocks. The first, which he began painting in 1478, hangs in the Louvre. He later painted another version which is in London's National Gallery.

10. Leonardo was tall, at least 5 ft 8, athletic and handsome! As he grew older he wore his hair long, grew a beard down to his chest and wore brightly-coloured clothes, which was very different to other men of his time.

Timeline

Did you know?

Leonardo Da Vinci never married or had children (which is probably why he had so much time to dedicate to his incredible drawings, ideas and inventions!).

He apparently could draw with one hand and write with the other - imagine how useful that would be at school!

Da Vinci was the brains behind the bicycle, the aeroplane, the helicopter and the parachute - amazingly he drew designs for all these machines about 500 years before their time!

Leonardo is commonly known as the 'Renaissance man'. Renaissance is actually a french word meaning 'rebirth' and it describes the time in history which began in Italy in the 14th century when there was lots of excitement about art, science and architecture.

Unlike many well known artists, Da Vinci was actually famous for his paintings when he was alive but it was only much much later that people realised that he was such a talented scientist and inventor too.

The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by a former employee who felt the painting belonged in Italy. He actually walked out of the gallery with the painting under his clothes and it was two years before the painting was returned safely!

The Mona Lisa was one of Da Vinci's favourite paintings and he apparently carried it with him until he died.

By studying the human body in so much detail, Leonardo became rather an expert in anatomy (how the body is made up). The Vitruvian man is Da Vinci's famous pencil drawing of a man with ideal human proportions and it's reproduced on Italy's 1 euro coin.

See if you can find the following in the gallery below:

A statue of Leonardo

Da Vinci's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa

Portrait of Ginevra Benci

Da Vinci's Vitruvian man

The Last Supper

The Louvre in Paris

Florence, the city right near where Da Vinci was born

A statue of Leonardo in Florence

A bust portrait of Da Vinci

Gallery

About

Leonardo Da Vinci was undoubtedly ahead of his time, with incredibly forward-thinking ideas and discoveries.

As a young boy, Leonardo enjoyed drawing and music. His father must have thought his son talented because he showed his drawings to an artist named Andrea del Verrocchio, who immediately recognised that Da Vinci should be trained as an artist.

Leonardo showed a great interest in the world around him. He was inspired by people and nature and used what he saw to create his wealth of ideas. He studied the human body in great depth, in fact in more detail than the doctors of his time! And he was already working on the idea of flight. Can you believe he actually designed the bicycle, the aeroplane, the helicopter and the parachute?

Leonardo wasn't just interested in what things looked like - he wanted to know how things worked too. As well as being determined to draw things exactly as they looked, he was fascinated by how the human eye worked, how plants grew and how birds flew.

In about 1478, Leonardo set up his own studio and was asked by the church to create a big altarpiece, the Adoration of the Magi. He never finished this painting as he was offered a job by the Duke of Milan as court artist and he accepted. In Milan he not only created famous paintings such as Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper but turned his hand to theatre design, too, and created some marvellous machinery.

It was while he painted The Last Supper that Da Vinci experimented with new oil-based paints. But the paint didn't stick well to the walls and began to flake off. What is left of the famous painting now is largely a reconstruction.

When Leonardo returned to Florence in 1500, he returned as a very well-known and respected man. It was during this time that he painted the Mona Lisa.

After this Da Vinci produced no new paintings and spent most of his time filling his notebooks with scientific drawings and ideas. He was interested in firearms, the action of water, the human body and how it worked, how birds could fly and how plants grew and his amazing ideas and drawings continue to inspire us today.

Da Vinci spent his final years in France, having been invited by King Francis I who not only gave him a house but the title of first painter, architect and mechanic to the King!

Leonardo suffered a lot of sickness in the later years of his life and his right hand was partially paralysed due to a stroke. He had hoped to organise all his drawings, notebooks and ideas before he died but he never managed to achieve his goal and it was many, many years before all his incredible notebooks were properly discovered and the extent of his genius realised.

Leonardo died on May 2, 1519 at Clos Luce in France where he had spent the last few years of his life, just a few weeks after his 67th birthday.

Related Videos

Just for fun...

Children's books about Leonardo Da Vinci

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Leonardo Da Vinci: famous quotes

'Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind."

"Human subtlety... will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous."

"Every man at three years old is half his height."

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Leonardo Da Vinci is probably best known as the famous artist who painted the 'Mona Lisa', which has hung in the Louvre gallery in Paris for over 200 years. However he wasn't just a great painter. Da Vinci was also a sculptor, an architect, a poet, a composer, a scientist, a mathematician and an inventor.

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Art With Mati & Dada  – VanGogh | Kids Animated Short Stories in English