Cave paintings of Lascaux lesson

So funny story, as we did our geography lessons for France, I realized our France Unit turned mostly into a homeschool Artist Studies about famous French artists (and Future Ticia 2024 says probably a third of the artists on there came from our France unit and another third from Italy), and what I’d tentatively written in my notes for publishing today I had no interest in writing, so instead I wanted to share our cave paintings of Lascaux lesson.

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Why I haven’t taught the cave paintings of Lascaux lesson before

We have studied Ancient history twice with the Mystery of History 1, and there’s not a lesson in there about the cave paintings, and while it’s super duper cool, there’s no particular historical significance to it in and of itself. It’s more significant for art history, which is a completely different area of study.  Now what has been interesting, is the number of similar paintings we’ve found since then.  Why even in our local caves about 10 miles from my house are paintings almost exactly the same style.  That is interesting, because most other art styles are very different by where you live, but all of the cave paintings are similar in style, which intrigues me a lot.

So, I was super happy to find a picture book on the caves, The Secret Cave: Discovering Lascaux* to include this as our mini-art history lesson for the kids.

The Secret Cave: Discovering Lascaux

I had never known the exact details behind how the caves were discovered.  Did you know they were discovered by some boys by accident?  They spent quite a while charging people to be brought into the caves until some adults caught wind of the find and decided to study it for themselves.  The kids felt quite cheated out of their cool find/way to make money (or at least that’s how the book tells it). 

As I was writing this post, I found this cave paintings of Lascaux video, which gives some interesting cultural relevance to the cave paintings, and gives more details of how this find is significant for art history.

In case you’re curious, more ideas on French History

• France Picture books
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• Seven Years War
• French and Indian War

Cave paintings of Lascaux lesson, what we actually did

I’ve given you a few bits and pieces of history and things I found interesting, but as to the actual lesson once we read the book.  We did the archetypical art project I’ve been wanting to do for years.  We took paper bags and scrunched it up, roughed it up until it was fairly fuzzy to imitate the walls of the cave (this particular project is usually reserved for studying native Americans or some form of painting on pseudo leather, but I thought it adapted nicely for the caves).

Then after we’d appropriately distressed the paper, we set to painting with liquid watercolor* (I got mine from Oriental Trading Co, and don’t particularly like mine, these look to be good, but not expensive).

The kids really don’t like working with watercolors because they find them to be even less precise than acrylic paint (their chosen form of paint), and were frustrated large portions of the time.  They were also frustrated by my saying they HAD to draw animals like in the cave paintings, so no you can’t draw a giant army battle going on.  Though Superman’s native drawing style is similar in style to the cave paintings.

In the end we had a set of paintings that nicely mimicked the cave paintings to my mind.

What others had to say about France

I reached out to fellow bloggers to see what they had to say, and here’s what I got (I picked the first three they gave me that seemed fun):

Future Ticia 2024 says sadly most of the blogs are no longer public or up, so I can’t link to them anymore and we are left with just one post.

• Christmas in France