Evaluating our School Year: Composer Study

This post is part of a series I'm doing as a way to evaluate our school year.  I am covering each subject, describing what we did; what worked for us and what didn't work; and detailing any changes I plan to make.  I find this process so helpful as I finish out our year and before I begin to plan for our next year.  

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Composer Study 

This will be short and sweet, because it really isn't that complicated.  The whole idea is that we will just listen and enjoy beautiful classical music.  So we do that.  :) 

Ambleside has a Composer Schedule with links to various works, so that is where I go to find composers.

WHAT WE DO: 

We listened to the music of two composers this year:

Sergei Rachmaninoff (6 works)
Johannes Brahms (6 works)

I have it on the schedule once a week, and I will often play it while we're doing chores (cleaning up the kitchen, sweeping the floor, folding laundry, etc.) or while the kids are drawing.  I will just say the name of the composer, trying my best to pronounce it ;) and we'll simply listen.

That's ALL!

Mid-year Morning Time Review

[morning time schedule from our first week of school]

Today is Mark’s day off, which means he does school with the kids, and I get to leave the house and have time away all by myself.  As I was getting ready to go, he was reading to them from the Bible-- a long portion, covering the Easter Story.  I made myself breakfast and lingered a bit in the kitchen, listening to their questions and discussion.  It was so hard for me not to sit down and participate. I truly love our morning times together. 

This is week 21 of our 36-week school year, and I was thinking recently how on any given day, we may only do a little bit, one verse of a hymn, one poem, one verse from the Bible, etc.... but that a little bit each day adds up to a whole lot.  Here's a list of the material we’ve covered during our morning times together throughout these first 21 weeks:
*I've marked review items with a star

Hymns:
A Mighty Fortress is Our God
Great is Thy Faithfulness
How Great Thou Art
Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty
What a Friend We Have in Jesus
Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee
Blessed Assurance

Scripture memorized:
Psalm 19*
Psalm 33:5*
Psalm 105
Proverbs 15:28
Proverbs 18:21
Luke 2:1-20
Luke 6:45

Other memory work:
Books of the Old Testament*
Family Ways

Poems memorized:
If (Rudyard Kipling)
Nine o’clock Bell* (Eleanor Farjeon)
The Mist and All (Dixie Willson)
Who Has Seen the Wind?* (Christina Rossetti)
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening (Robert Frost)
The Eagle* (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
February Twilight (Sara Teasdale)

The Children’s Hour* (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
The Lake Isle of Innisfree (William Butler Yeats)
Written in March* (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Picture Study:
George Seurat (5 works of art)
Claude Monet (several works; he's one of my favorites!)
...and we spent a couple of weeks reviewing previous years’ artists

Composer Study:
Sergei Rachmaninoff (6 works)
Johannes Brahms (6 works)

Shakespeare:
The Taming of the Shrew (we also watched a video of this one)
A Winter’s Tale
King Lear
...using either Lamb or Nesbit
We also read this book aloud: Shakespeare: His Work and His World

Plutarch:
Marcus Crassus
(This was our first foray into Plutarch, using Anne White’s study guide, and the kids-- especially my boys-- have really enjoyed the readings and discussion.)

Science:
Pagoo (read-aloud)
Nature Study
various experiments

Geography:
-some readings from Home Geography (Long)

Map Work:
-freehand drawings of the continents & oceans
-13 colonies
-Europe (spanning several weeks)

Art:
-drawing lessons using this book: Drawing Textbook
-various nature study drawings
-still-life drawings: setting up objects on the ottoman in the center of the living room and everyone circles around with their sketch books and draws what they see
-our own painted reproductions of our favorites from Monet & Seurat

Grammar:
-lessons from Simply Grammar & First Language Lessons (skipping around those books, where we needed brushing up)
-a smattering of Grammar Worksheets from this site.
-(Most of our grammar is learned through reading and dictation.)


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2010-11 Year in Review: Composer Study

We are super low-key about Composer Study, as you'll soon find out. If you want some more in-depth suggestions, click on over to Ambleside and do what they say. :)

I began the year with a plan to listen to Mr. Bach Comes to Call and one other CD~ the Beethoven one, I think. It's a dramatized story with some history thrown in and, of course: the music of the composers. We did listen to Mr. Bach Comes to Call, but for some reason we don't do audio CDs well here. I don't know what it is-- we listen to music just fine but for some reason it always seems too distracting in our home to tune into dialogue on a CD. (Maybe it's because I don't personally love the additional noise it creates or maybe it's because when we quieted to listen, the little girls decided that was the time to get louder. :)) I ended up setting up the CD in another room with the older three kids and entertained the little girls away from them, but that sort of defeated the purpose of doing this part of school all together. And then- I wasn't able to hear it, so I couldn't follow up on what they had heard. So I scrapped this plan and moved to Plan B, which was *really* simple:

I simply checked out various classical music CDs at the library and we listened to them. We did that for awhile~ we'd fold laundry together and listen to classical music, or I'd play it while the kids were doing their schoolwork at the table. That's it. So not really Composer *Study*, then, more like Composer Listening. ;)

Then. Mark discovered a gem of a book at a thrift store and I was (still am) over-the-moon about it. He actually found four composer biographies for about $1.99 apiece. Neither of us had never heard of these, but he showed them to me and after a quick perusal, I knew they were a find! It appears there are several more in the set, and now I'm on the lookout for them because we love them so much. I took some photos of the Peter Tschaikowsky book for you:



This is what we settled into, and it just suits us so well. The kids loved this book! Each week I read a portion of the book, and as we read, we listened to Tschaikowsky on Pandora. Easy-peasy. :)

So that's that. Next year I plan to simply delve into the other biographies we have collected.

Note: If you're interested, Zeezok Publishing has republished these Opal Wheeler biographies, and you can find them here.

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Click here for an earlier post detailing another season of Composer Study in our home.

Next post: Picture Study