Feb 17 2009
Music, Art, and the Home School
Our artist for the next two or three weeks is Monet. The way that I do an art study is to first find a brief biography of the artist either online or at the library. If I look for one at the library, I usually look in the easy reading section for younger students, because those are the books that feature the most relevant, easy to remember facts. If the girls get really excited about a subject, they will continue to read about it on their own, with no prompting from me, but I like to start it off gently. After reading a brief history of the artist, I find examples of their work online, and set it as our desktop background on the computer. There, it will remain until Monday, when I change it. At some point during the week, I will ask the girls to study the painting for a few minutes, then cover it, and have them draw everything that they remember about the painting. I’m not looking for a perfect reproduction of the Mona Lisa, I’m just sharpening their memory skills and helping them to study well enough that they can remember details. This is the way that I “test” the children to find out what they remember. These “reproductions” are titled appropriately, and filed in their notebooks or learning journals.
If possible, I will look up artists and composers on Netflix. Last night, I discovered a movie about the life of Mozart titled Famous Composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and learned that my oldest has already put The Magic Flute on the list. Since we are studying Mozart right now, I moved those movies to the top spots in the list so that we will get them soon. For Monet, I found an interesting looking animated movie called Linnea in Monet’s Garden.
Here is the biography that we read about Monet: Biography of Monet
The example of his work that we are studying this week is “Impression Sunrise”, which is the painting that started the Impressionist movement. You can find this and more at:
Monet’s Paintings
If you want to set it as your desktop background, you should click on it to make it a little bit bigger on your screen, then right click on the enlarged image, and select “set as desktop background”.
In teaching art and music appreciation in this way, you will be surprised to find that your children retain this information and will be eager to point out examples of Mozart and Monet, or any other artists/composer that you study, as they appear in cartoons, movies, even museums if you live in an area where art museums are available to you.
Tomorrow, I will feature some nice freebies that I have found that can be useful for your home school, or for any household. I am pleased to announce that I have finally found out how to make links clickable on today.com. Thank you to all that have helped me with this effort. Also, I will leave you with a word about comments on my blog. My dream is to make my comment area sort of a water cooler or sorts as it was called by a fellow today.com blogger. Please comment as often as you like, and even use it as a discussion forum. I don’t object to links to your own blogs, because I like to visit, and if there is something that you would like me to address in a future post, by all means, leave me a comment, and I will do my best. Just play nice and let me know what you think.
Have a Great Day!
Laurel Santiago
I support the Homeschools and like the concept. I do not have any kids and when I was in school, I went to the local public school. I would not put my kids in public schools today!
This is a fantastic way to teach children art appreciation! I don’t recall the name of the book (it’s been a few years) but I used to have a book which had black and white reproductions of 24 or so different famous artists + a full color poster of each painting and a one-page biography.
I would put up a different poster for a couple weeks, and for free time students could use copies of the black and white to color their own. version.
I’m sure you’ve seen these already, but there are some great movies about Bach and Mozart, etc., as well on a childs level.
Coincidentally enough, this past week-end I traveled up to the Frye Art Museum, a place I was taken to fairly frequently when I was small. I told the lady behind the info desk that the last time I was there I couldn’t have seen over the desk; she was delighted.
Looking directly at the paintings that I used to look up at to see was an interesting experience all by itself. I was also reminded that Frye was the place that started my love of the Dutch masters.
Glorious that you’re instilling such a love of art in your kids so early!
You might want to know that Linnea in Monet’s Garden was a book first. (Then again, wasn’t everything?)
Sounds like an excellent way for the kids to study; I’m jealous.