Day #6/175 Days – Fine Arts

My sister and I started talking about a month ago about ways to incorporate more of the fine arts in our school year. She came up with the idea of a little mini co-op with just the two of us. One time a month we all head south to her house and the other meeting she comes up here to ours.

We meet at the end of August and planned out what we were going to study. We are using some videos by Barry Stebbing for our art history and drawing lessons. We are using a hodge-podge of other materials to round out everything else.

Today was our first class day. Overall it was a good day. We realized we have too much reading planned for the music appreciation time so we may end up changing that a bit.

Mornings are reserved for music while after lunch is art time. My sister will lead the music time and I will lead the art time.

• We began reading in Story of the Orchestra about the violin.
• We listened to the recommended track of the Story of the Orchestra CD of the violin.
• We listed four things the boys learned about violins on the white board. They then choose three to copy on to their mini books (found at Homeschool Share).
• Read about the harpsichord in Story of the Orchestra
• Listened to the recommended tracks
• Listed four things (one from each boy) and they created their mini books for this instrument as well.
• Read about Bach in Meet the Great Composers
• Read more about Bach from A Young Scholar’s Guide to the Composers book.
• While reading from the above book, the boys had the Student Review pages. Anytime they thought they had heard the answer to a question, they raised their hand, read the question, and answered it. This kept them pretty engaged.
• Listened to the CD track from Meet the Great Composers of one of Bach’s songs. We had the boys try to pick out violins or harpsichord.

At this point we figured the boys had done enough music. We had wanted to read from Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers but thought it would be too much sitting at this point. There are also notebook pages as part of the Young Scholar’s book but the rebelling over writing had started so we saved this as “homework.”
We let them go have some fun play time while we made lunch. After lunch we tackled art.

• Watched Lesson 1 of Barry Stebbing’s “God and the History of Art.” This covered “What is Art?”
• We created color wheels using tempera paint. The boys were given red, yellow, blue, green, and purple and had to create all the other colors needed from those (including orange).
• I read to them from Art in Story about Rembrandt.
• We then looked at a lot of portraits (self and otherwise) in a book I have of Rembrandt. The reproductions in it were very well done. We talked about what the people in the paintings may have been and what clues we saw in the painting to support that.
• The boys then created their own self-portraits simply using paper and pencil.
• We also talked about etchings and how Rembrandt created those. There were some examples in my book as well so we looked at those.
• We used some simple etching kits picked up at the Dollar Store to create our own etchings.

Overall a full and productive day.