Vivaldi and the Four Seasons

We have been painting and listening to Vivaldi's Four Seasons these past few weeks. I have always loved to paint, draw or create with music playing, so it was fun to do this with the boys for these lessons. They did a great job picking a theme to paint for each season and drawing the picture and painting it all by themselves. We began with Summer....

Vivaldi Summer link

Summer by Zak

Summer by Max

Summer by TJ

Autumn Vivaldi link

Autumn by TJ

Autumn by Max

Autumn by Zak

Vivaldi winter Link

Winter by Max

Winter by TJ

Winter by Zak

Vivaldi Spring Link

Spring by Max

Spring by TJ

Spring by Zak

Art Lesson

There are three parts to our art lesson this year. Art skills, Art history, and Art Appreciation. Our Artist Study this year is centered around just one artist Giotto Di Bondone. We will be at times looking at some of the other famous artist of the Medieval times like Cimbaque Giotto's teacher,  but mostly we will be studying Giotto. I spent a entire term at University doing an art history course on Giotto's Chapel in Scrovegni and I am excited to share this wonderful artist with my boys. So we will be reading about Giotto and the world he lived in and looking at his many many paintings and sculptures. We will also be improving our won art skill once a week by learning more about painting with tempera paints and water colors.

Art skills is something I believe every child can develop. Like any other skill some take to it more readily than others but all can learn to mix paint, hold a brush and draw what they see. All can make art. Each week we have been doing a painting lesson out of the wonderful text by Barry Stebbing called I Can Do All Things. This is our study in mixing different blues and using them in the dolphin drawing.

And heres a close up our mixing greens picture with the grasshopper.

and here is TJ's study of mixing red.

I am using a large picture book entitled Masters of art: Giotto and Medieval Art as my spine for the year in our Art History lesson and adding to it Giotto Tended the Sheep by Opal Wheeler for our back ground info about the artist. Sister Wendy also does a wonderful you tube introducing Giotto in her series called The Story of Painting. (part 2 "The hero steps forth is about Giotto) and Madeline L'Engle has put together a beautiful book entitled The Glorious Impossible but we will use this book more in our art appreciation lessons than here in the art history lesson.

Our Art Appreciation lessons are mostly picture studies, but sometimes we will do a hands on project to help us further understand the art in Giotto's time and how he made his art on frescoes and with egg tempera paint etc. I am using Simply Charlotte Masons Picture Study Portfolio and Madeline L'Engle's book The Glorious Impossible, and there is a wonderful collection of Giotto's work online here that allows you to see the paintings as a slide show.

Week Fifteen Wrap-Up

We would be half way done with this year but we plan to school the whole year round with a month of in May and part of June. So our halfway point is really in Feb-March. At that point we switch to Ancient Roman history and the study of Insects. I can't wait! But for now we took another day off to celebrate Max's 9th birthday!

Happy Birthday Max!

Bible: We are finishing up Genesis this week and moving on the the last book of the Bible, Revelation.

Stories of Faith: We finished This Way to Christmas as well this week and Have begun to read The Christmas Porringer.

Math: We have completed the Usborne math skills Multiplying and Dividing Puzzles and will begin to work through Everyday Number Stories in rotation with The Multiplication Matrix. We did work through Everyday number stories last summer but I know that this year now that we have had some good work on multiplication tables and division that the book will be much more beneficial. 

We are continuing to read about Albert Einstein from Kathleen Krull's book entitled Albert Einstein (Giants of Science series)

Aesop Copywork:

Ancient Greek History: We are reading Alexander the Great by John Hunter.

Geography: Our Little Spartan Cousin of long ago by Julia Darrow Cowles.

Science the Study of Birds: We are reading Reddy the Woodpecker by Arthur Scott Bailey this week. I am thrilled. The living books we have been reading about birds is igniting an interest and the boys are doing a lot of looking up birds on their own. Yesterday was a typical day in this area as Max had out the large volume of Birds the definitive guide by DK and finding birds he knew. Birds from Winged Migration a movie we watched umpteen times when he was only three-six years old or so, Birds from our readings, Birds form our yard and neighborhood. As he poured over the pages looking at flight migration paths and where each bird can be found he felt as if he was looking at old friends. At the same moment the twins were playing the birds of America concentration game I picked up at Good Will this summer and naming all the birds they "knew". Earlier this week I found them all three out in our yard with their binoculars searching the skies for birds and looking  up in the trees for nests. TJ finds the littlest birds nests often after they have fallen out f the tree where they were perched. We think it is the warbler who is making them.

And look what we found 'stealing' grain from the chicken pen.

I also found a handy link to many living nature books by Thornton Burgess and Arthur Scott Bailey over at Manybooks.com.

Nature notebooks: This week we learned to draw an owl.

Langaue Arts: We completed lessons #35-38 in Primary Language Lessons which includes work on has and have, a little dictation, an oral lesson about cows and milk where I focus on having the boys answer the questions in complete sentences. The lesson was about milk so we made homemade marshmallows and hot chocolate for a lunch time snack!

Bed time story: Little Town on the Prairie.

Afternoon Audio book: Narnia, The lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian several times over.

Reading aloud: Elson Reader Book Three, still working on two pages a day for each boy. They are getting much more fluent and it is more and more of a pleasure to hear then read.

Latin: This week we learned a new dialogue using adverbs and verbs. We have spent the week learning the new verbs and adverbs as vocabulary and as parts of speech and how they are used in Latin and in English. How to identify them and how to use them ourselves.

Art/Music: Drawing lesson #15 evolved into a multimedia painting. The lesson was about drawing ellipses which create a bowl with fruit in it. So their were examples in our drawing book of different fruits and how to draw a bowl. The boys practiced drawing a bowl and then I showed them this picture that I found on pinterest:

The foundation of all painting is drawing so it seemed an easy step to take our bowl drawing and make a painting out of it. Our source picture was created by Mrs. Anderson for her art class but there were no instructions on the website were it was pinned from on how to do it so we just winged it and had some fun. 

We began by mixing acrylic paint to get the color Mrs. Anderson had in her background. Then the boys painted that color onto a canvas panels. These are wonderful, They are much less expensive than a real canvas but it gives the feel and look of a canvas when painted. I love them. While the paint was still wet, with the back of our brush we drew swirls and designs into it. Then we set it aside to dry.

While the background was drying I printed off some paper with words on it. Any print will do. Then the boys drew fruit with pencils using the ideas from the drawing book to guide them. It was hard to think to draw the fruit big enough to make a presence on the painting but they got it in the end. Once the fruits were drawn they got out their gauche paints (opaque water colors) and painted them. Then those were set those aside to dry while the table top was draw and painted as well on printed paper.

Once all the printed fruits and table tops were dry the boys "glued" them onto their now dry backgrounds. done for the day.

The next day as we listened to Chopin the boys painted on the black outline of the table, the fruit stems and leaves, the q-tipped white dots (you can use the back of your brush too) and signed their names.

Merry Christmas!

Week Two Wrap-Up

I can't say enough about our new schedule...I just LOVE IT! We start at 11am do four lessons, break for lunch and then do four more lessons ending at 3pm or 4pm depending on the day. What I love most is having the time in the morning to get a lot done before we begin. By that time I have accomplished something or often many things and I am feeling I am ready for the boys. I am prepared to focus on them, be more patient, more relaxed and thus a better teacher and mom. I also LOVE having lunch right in the middle of the lessons to give us all a mental and emotional break. Seems to take the weight off of the day and allows us time to talk during the meal about things we have learned in the lessons. Often as they linger over the meal I read the next lesson while they are eating the last morsels of food. Ahh multi-tasking I love it too!!

This week we have been reading through Daniel. My dh does this over breakfast. We have heard the stories before many times but still I am amazed at Daniel's trust in God up to the last almost fatal moment. I would have cried "unfair!" "Enough!" when the satraps slandered him and plotted to usurp him even to kill him. But Daniel believed God would save him even though he was being thrown into a den of hungry lions. Amazing. How far would you let God seemingly ruin your life before you stopped trusting He is good enough to save you?

First lesson of the day is reading from Buchko. I read about two chapters before the 30 minutes for the lesson is up and we are moving along to math. (I changed the order of our lesson this week to to coincide better with my planner.) We are loving to hear how Bruce is telling the stone aged indians about the gospel. How he puts it into terms and ideas the indians can understand. I simply love the idea of tying my hammock into God and getting in with both feet. This is more challenging then it seems when you realize the Motilone indians he is speaking to sleep in hammocks 25 feet off the ground. Yikes! That takes a bit of trust to tie in way up there. It is also a way they invite you to be part of them. If a girl likes a boy she ties her hammock next to his and they are then officially married. Hearing ideas we know so well put into new terms makes it more clear to us. The boys all heartily agreed tying their hammocks  into God is a wonderful idea!

We are having a lot of fun with the skip counting songs in math. We moved on to the X3 and X4 songs this week. The X4 song is a country western tune which really resonates with my bluegrass heart. Yippe i kie aaaay we skip count every day! In addition I introduced the boys to Sal from Khan Academy. (Thanks Debbie for the pointer) He has been explaining to them about what Multiplication is and what a multiplication table is. Then we made our own tables this week. Max especially liked it. We played An old style version of Multiplication Bingo that I found at the Goodwill this summer for our game-activity-fun day.

After Math we are reading from the Story of the Greeks and preparing for our Saturday Scrapbook day. The boys want to scrapbook about the Greek Olympics. So we will be working on that theme for a few weeks. We did get our books started last Saturday, see Max's inside cover and title page below.

We are using a basic wire bound sketch book for our scrapbook. The map on the cover came from Homeschool in the woods packet of old world maps. The title page is from Notebooking Pages packet of Ancient Times pages. On the other cover of the book we plan to add the old world style map for Ancient Rome. Thus the book will open left to right for Ancient Greece and right to left for Ancient Rome. Somewhere in the middle they will meet. We did more this week preparing things for the pages on the olympics but the boys wanted me to wait to show you it all when they have it done. So I will let it remain a mystery until then.

Also last week on our 6th day/fun day we did our first nature notebook entry. Using Keeping a Nature Journal by Clare Leslie Walker I introduced the boys to the scientific aspect of nature hikes/walks...recording your observations. Following Clare's advice from Chapter 2 "Beginning Your Journal" we entered our daily observations. There are eight of them noted on page 22:

1. Name
2. Date
3. Place
4. Time
5. Weather
6. First Impressions
7. Wind direction
8. Cloud Patterns

Then we drew something we loved:

Before we do an entry I read a little from her book that I think would help them form an idea about what a nature journal can be or  something that would inspire them. I love this quote form the book (Zak did too!)

"Think of a nature journal as a treasure hunt. Ask yourself, "what's out there beyond  the doorstep? What treasures will I find?" You will be amazed when you actually get outside at all the things there are to draw or write about." - Clare Walker Leslie

Following a reading from the Stories from Ancient Greece we  continue our reading through the Burgess Bird Book. We have met the fly catchers and the woodpeckers, the cow bird and many other friends of Peter Rabbit in the Old Orchard. There happens to be copious resources to go along with this book, but here are three of my favorite ones:

Audio version
Free Printables that go well with the stories
Burgess Book Companion Web site

I am however going to keep our reading simple and just read and look up birds in resources books I mentioned last week. Having said that I did decide to add one more resource, The Handbook of Nature Study. It was a DUH! moment when I realized I had the text on my shelf and the questions Max was asking could easily be answered by reading there. SO we are reading more from that book next week.

Lunch Break!!!

After eating is a Language Arts lesson or two. We have been working through a dictation lesson this week from Primary Language Lessons. The word SQUIRRELS was hard for the boys to master so we wrote the word over many times and did dictation a few days in a row on the same sentence until they got it! Boy were they proud! In the same book, PLL, we did an short lesson on when to use "is" or "are." They also wrote a short story about squirrels using "is" and "are" in their composition notebooks (which we picked up at Walmart for cheap). Take a look...

I recommend getting the teacher's edition to supplement the student text of PLL as it has some wonderful ideas for how to implement and further use the lessons. When it sugested writing a story or drawing a picture about squirrels I knew that would be  good switch from dictation. It also allowed them to use the word they had mastered their own way. I addition to the teacher's guide, I recommend either Living books curriculum layout workbook or Cynce's because it makes doing the lessons so much easier having places already set out to write your answers.

Here is Max's drawing from the poem "If I knew" (Where the box where the smiles were kept)

I enjoyed hearing the boys read out loud to me from Elson Reader book Three and narrate the story this week. They chose to go through this series last year and they still love it. I love it too, as the stories they read to me are good ones and though not modern they have timeless values woven into them which is refreshing. So I have them read two or three pages for me this fall. We were reading 5 to 7 this summer from Peter and Polly in Summer, but the words in these short stories are bigger, and more challenging to sound out. I don't want to tire them out, I want them to practice, so we read what they can get done in about 15-20 minutes. So far it has worked out very well. The truth be told...I don't know if I could do much more than that. Listening to three emerging readers for one hour is about my limit too!

To complete L.A. for the day we have one more lesson. Just before bed we are reading  The Wind in the Willows. Oh how I love this book! It is chocolate to the ears. To supplement my own readings I also play an audio version of the  chapters I have already read. (They just can't get enough) The audio version we have I picked up a garage sale for next to nothing. It is part of a set called The Children's Classic Library. It includes more than Wind in the Willows, it also contains  40 other classic stories like Treasure Island, Pinocchio and Heidi. I love that they are unabridged and dramatized. Gives my throat a break and they get their fill of good literature. Win win!

Onto Lain! We have made some good progress with our dialogue "meet the family" in the Minimus  Latin curriculum we are using this year. We must have listened to the dialogue about 7 times before the boys were able to read it all the way through making no mistakes and understanding the dialogue. Each time we listened to the dialogue more details became clear. Then each one was given a chance to read it out loud while the others listened. Once that was complete, we took about half of the vocab words at a time and wrote them onto 3 X 5 cards. The latin they wrote on the front and a picture of the word or the english word on the back. These flash cards that they are making for themselves was an idea from the teacher's manual. Take a look at Max's card for Feles (cat).

Once they had completed all of the vocab words we played a sort of spelling bee type of game to reinforce them. They stood up together in a line and I gave them first the latin and they gave me the english, then I gave them the english and they would give me the latin. If they failed at a word they sat down and the last one standing was the winner. We played several times and all won in the end. Today (Thursday) we translated a birthday invitation which was found at Vindolanda in an excavation.

You know a boy loves a book when he puts his legos aside just to listen. Well that is what they do when I bring out The Story of Peter Tchaikovsky by Opal Wheeler. Zak said, "I just love that horse boy."

Our look at Paul Klee this week has resulted in some fun drawings and paintings of cats.

Tj is painting a 'the cat head' based upon the coloring page we did last week called "The Head of Man."

Here is Max working on his 'cat head.' We began the drawing by tracing a bowl form the kitchen. Having the circle thus define the space made the rest of the drawing/painting a piece of cake.

We then morphed from "The Head of Man" to "The Cat head" to Klee's "Cat and Bird". There is a great site we used to guide in drawing this. You can check it out here.

Can you find their signature in the drawing? We used oil pastels to color these.

Zak said this is chocolate cat! And so it is.  I hope it is a chocolate ice cream cat!

That is all for this week. I hope you are having a good one too.

Just the Basics

Our school year is winding down. We have a few more things to wrap up in Egypt and in Astronomy and our artist study of Renoir is about half-way done. We finished all our other subjects including our phonics rule book and the second Elson reader, and now I have fun plans for the summer! We usually do school all year round unless we travel and it is just not possible...in the past that has been so, but this year even though we are traveling I have put together a "Just the Basics" homeschool for the road. It includes the three Charlotte Mason musts: Reading living books, narrating and copywork. We added some math. And simply for fun we are doing some nature study about bugs and birds and some art with Artistic Pursuits.

This is the 3R's bundle. In these two homemade books we get done math and reading, narration, and copywork. The boys keep the two books in their folders with a writing pen and we are set to go. A day of lessons looks like this:

• The boys read the story to me and then tell back the story they read. (narrate).
• Then they copy a sentence from the story. (see picture below)
• Then we do two pages from Everyday Number Stories.
• Then one day we do an art lesson, and then the next day nature study.
• I still read aloud to them at night, this summer we are reading through The Moral Compass compiled by William J. Bennett and other books like Children of the Summer and nature stories by Arthur Scott Bailey

The fun part about being on the road is that other people get to help out with the schooling.

Grandma is helping Zak with his reading lesson.

Using Peter and Polly in Spring (Peter and Polly in Summer follows spring and will soon be available at Currclick) the boys practice reading aloud, and then they narrate the story back to me. Both Everyday Number Stories and Peter and Polly in Spring are bound with a Pro-Click Binder. If we stay on schedule we may get to read both Peter and Polly in Spring and Peter and Polly in Summer before next year.

After the boys read and narrate they then copy a sentence from the story on this pre-made copywork page which is included in the Peter and Polly e-book along with ideas for nature study and a coloring page. We decided to just use the copywork pages.

Each day we also do two pages from Everyday Number Stories. If you like Emma Serl's Primary Language Lessons you may want to try this math book as Emma Serl wrote Everyday Number Stories too! 

I simply love this book. It is the perfect bridge for us to recall the addition and subtraction work we did this last year and to then introduce simple multiplication and division. Along the way we get exposure to fractions, measurement, days of the week, money and time.

Everyday Number Stories introduces each new concept first with a story about Frank and Kate using the math concept in real life. In the story above Kate is buying ribbon and she is inroducung the concept of 3 feet = 1 yard. Then on the opposite page the problems focus on doing sums with the info from the story. each time doing number problems are within a span, like number under 12 or under 24 etc.  it increases as the book continues until all numbers up to 144 are worked.

I also love that it is FREE!! Find it here.

For fun we are reading living books about bugs and birds and getting out in nature to observe them.

Above are the following tools the boys have in their back packs for our nature study this summer.

• Spiral bound notebook and a pen.
• small water color book for small paintings and a small paper pad for drawings.
•  a guide for bugs and a guide for birds. Pocket sized so they fit in their hands.
• Binoculars
• butterfly garden
• a bug jar with a magnifying top
• a butterfly net
• sharp eyes

We just finsihed reading Children of the Summer which is a delightful story about Jean Henri Fabri. The story is told from the point of view of his son Paul as he watched his father play "tricks" on different insects to see what they would do when Paul was a little boy. The illustrations are also fabulous!

Also for fun we are going to do many of the art lessons in Artistic Pursuits Grade K-3 Book Three and Child-sized Masterpieces Modern School for steps 6 and 7. So we get to explore painting, sculpture, junk fabrication, computer art and pastels. It will be a wonderful way to review the impressionists/post-impressionists we studied last year and bridge over to the post-impressionists/modern artists we plan to look at next year. After we do the 3R's we will alternate between doing nature study or an art lesson. Until then we are finishing up the subjects from last yet still undone. I love how home schooling can be so flexible!

I am so looking forward to this new fun schedule. Now if the weather would only get warmer.

When we are not doing this new schedule we have been doing this...

Climbing on the rock wall at the local Aquatic Center and...

Taking swimming lessons. This is Zak coming up for air and a big smile!