A Broad Education - The Arts

When children have begun regular lessons (that is, as soon as they are six), this sort of study of pictures should not be left to chance, but they should take one artist after another, term by term, and study quietly some half-dozen reproductions of his work in the course of the term.

Charlotte Mason - Home Education pg. 309

Something wonderful has happened in our home over the past year or so and I can't help but lay my personal thanks to Charlotte Mason and her ideas on "short lessons". Instead of sticking to only the basics of school subjects I have been able to open broad doors to a very liberal education for my children starting at a young age.
Left to myself I would never have felt able to tackle such subjects as literature, world history, art, classical music and composers, poetry and handicrafts. But being bolstered and instructed by an experienced educator (Miss Mason) we have boldly entered into each of these subjects.

"the lessons are short, seldom more than twenty minutes in length for children under eight..."

I have talked with other home school mom's who wish to add many of these border subjects to their child's school routine but are too overloaded with current schedules or unsure of how to proceed that they simply don't even try. Frankly had I not read Miss Mason's work I would have been in the same boat. It seems as though we as home school moms feel that we must cover all or not at all, we tend to overdue all subjects especially those that are not considered basics. Normally I would have approached art study or composer study thinking that we needed to read several books on the artist or composer and hear or study all of their works. Miss Mason's protocol for art and music study would have seemed very simplistic.
Thankfully, I was willing to try and have been overwhelmingly pleased with the results. Not only do we have the time (5-15 minutes, once a week) to study paintings and listen to musical selections we have also learned from narrating our impressions to each other and each of my school age children has enjoyed learning more about a particular artist or composer on their own.

The art training of children should proceed on two lines. The six-year-old child should begin both to express himself and to appreciate, and his appreciation should be well in advance of his power to express what he sees or imagines.
Charlotte Mason - Home Education pg. 307

If you are using Ambleside Online's composer rotation then at some point you will want to listen to Jean Sibelius's Symphony no. 1. I can't say that I've heard this symphony before or for that matter much at all by Sibelius but I am happy to say that it is a very good piece and we all enjoyed listening to it as well as watching the orchestra perform it.

You can read more about the symphony here and more about Jean Sibelius here.

If you are looking for an avenue for your kiddos to learn more about the symphony and the various musical instruments then I would highly recommend the games found at Carnegie Hall Listening Adventures. My children have really enjoyed playing the games and have learned a large amount about instruments and the symphony. They can each name the instruments by sight although we are still working on being able to name them by sound.

Term 3 Artist Study

For most of this year we have been using Harmony Fine Arts Grade 1 curriculum for our music and art appreciation and while I love this well put together curriculum I found that there were too many artists for my kids to get a good grasp on and I wasn't getting any of the wonderful extra activities in. So I decided to simplify a bit and go ahead and follow the Art rotation laid out on AmblesideOnline.

Now if you have not gone through AmblesideOnline with a fine toothpick comb yet, then please find an area and start clicking on all of those delightful links that have been provided. I just clicked on a few on the Art Schedule page and am really excited about using them.

In the past a member provided the art prints each term at a low cost but she is not able to do that anymore so you will need to find a way to get them yourself. I would highly recommend joining the AO Art yahoo group because you can download the terms artist pictures and those of past years. While you could print them out yourself at home I have found a cheap alternative that I wanted to share.

Since we have a fedex/kinkos store in the town that I frequent I got online yesterday and registered on their website and then placed an order to have the Van Gogh pictures printed out by them. This was unbelievably easy and took a matter of 10 minutes or so. I chose cardstock glossy paper and full-color copies to be made from the file that I had downloaded from the yahoo group and had uploaded to the kinkos site. And they have a promotion going right now for users to receive 20% off of a printing order so my total cost for having 7 pages printed was under $7!!!

Today I had errands to run in town and dropped by the store to pick up my prints. I was very happy with the results and can't wait to put them in use. I will be putting each print as we view it into a binder with page protectors. I also plan to keep my eyes open at garage sales for some nice 8 x 10 frames so that I can hang a few of our favorites up throughout the house.

Seriously, do you ever wonder what we would do without the internet!

How we do Artist and Picture Study

For Year 1 we have been using Harmony Fine Arts grade 1 curriculum. It has worked very well for us and been an inexpensive and fun addition to our school.
The Harmony Fine Arts curriculum is laid out to give you 1 composer and 1 artist to study during a 4 week time period. Also listed are which pictures to view each week and where to find them on the internet. This is a huge time saver and makes it very easy to implement into our lives.


ARTIST STUDY

On Friday we gather around the computer and read a short biography about the focus artist, then I load the picture to study on the computer and enlarge it so we see the whole thing (we do have a larger screen and this does help). Alissa and Thomas and I spend a few minutes studying the picture and then I turn the screen off and they narrate to me what the remember and what their impressions were, I generally join in on this since it's fun to hear the different impressions that each of us get from one picture.

Next I turn the screen back on and we talk about the different layers of the painting (foreground, background etc.) we also discuss how it was painted and maybe what the artist was thinking when he painted it.

Each of the kids have enjoyed this and their impressions are always very unique and interesting.

I also set the picture as the computer wallpaper so that we can enjoy it for the rest of the week!



COMPOSER STUDY

For the composer study at the beginning of the month we read the biography of the target composer and then put in the cd to listen to his music. I try to pick out 1 or 2 songs to focus on and discuss so that they are familiar with specific pieces. Also I try to find a few piano pieces of that particular composer to play for the kids throughout the month.



OTHER IDEAS

I also check our library for any kids picture books that can accompany either the artist or composer we are studying. There are usually quite a few books of the most famous composers i.e. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach.



When we were studying about Mozart I found a college theatrical production of the Magic Flute on youtube and amazingly the children watched most of it and enjoyed it immensly. I've also found video performances of Vivaldi pieces to familiarize Alissa and Thomas with the instruments they were hearing.


When I remember I try and find a clipart picture of the composer and artist to paste into our Book of Centuries. I haven't accomplished this every month but will be trying to get back to doing that.