Evaluating our School Year: Picture 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.  

~

Picture (Art) Study

WHAT WE DO:

We do Picture Study once a week.

This past year we studied three artists, and 5-6 paintings from each. We studied paintings by Georges Seurat, Claude Monet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

At the beginning of the year, I downloaded PDF files from the Ambleside Yahoo Group and had prints printed locally.  

I want my kids have a familiarity with the paintings and artists we've studied, so I make sure they have a print of each painting.  I get one 8 1/2x11 print of each of the paintings we'll study, and then four paintings printed per page for the kids to put in their binders; smaller versions of the paintings we've studied.  Here is an example of what they keep in the Picture Study section of their binders:

As to what the study part of this all looks like at our house, I've edited a post I wrote seven years ago to describe what we do.  We're still doing Picture Study the very same way, all these years later. 

Once each week, this is what we do:

Introduction:  If it is the first week and thus a new artist, I introduce the artist, giving the name; often in writing, and any biographical information I think is pertinent. Then I read a short bio or even just a few facts about the artist.  For all subsequent works by this same artist, I'll skip the biographical information but note the artists name each time, and recall the previous painting studied.

Description:  Then I pull out a print and hand it to a child, hiding it from the rest of the children, asking the selected child to describe what he or she sees. The rest of us listen and try to imagine the painting in our minds.  My children all love this part. They actually bicker over whose turn it is to describe a painting.

Questions: When the child has finished describing the painting, the rest of us get the opportunity to ask that child questions about the things our minds are still wondering about.  (I think this is one of the reasons why my kids love their role of narrator; they get to play teacher and "call" on their siblings' raised hands to take their questions. ;)) 

Reveal: When the questions wane, the child reveals the painting he or she has just described (and the rest of us have imagined) and we all exclaim over it and talk about it. 

That is our procedure with each new painting.

For example, our weeks studying Georges Seurat looked like this:

Week 1: Introduce artist, short bio, select a child to describe the painting: Rock-Breakers
Week 2: Brief review: Who remembers our new artist?  What was last week's painting?
New painting: Man Cleaning His Boat
Week 3: Brief review. New painting: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
Week 4: Brief review. New painting: Bathers at Asnieres 
(Mark was the teacher this week, and he let the kids choose a portion of the painting to paint.  I generally wait till the end of our study to do this.)
Week 5: Brief review. New painting: The Circus
Week 6: Brief review. New painting: The Eiffel Tower
Week 7 | Final week: Brief review. Compare and contrast all the paintings.  How are they similar?  How are they different?  Can you tell that the same artist painted all of these? Then, we paint. I choose one of the paintings we've studied for us all to attempt to paint.  (We each painted Seurat's The Eiffel Tower.)

*Each time we study a new painting, I choose a different child (or myself!) to describe it.

* * *

For further consideration and lists of artists, check out the artist rotation at Ambleside Online.  I don't actually follow the same order they suggest.  I choose artists that I love or that I think my kids would find interesting and we go from there.  :)  I really enjoyed my college Art History classes and I genuinely love introducing my kids to the painters I admire. 

Another post on Picture Study that may be of interest to you:

Picture Study Q & A

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.)


*This post contains affiliate links

Picture study: John Singleton Copley

We drew today for Picture Study:

Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, age 40

Paul Revere by Audra, age 4

Paul Revere by Isaias, age8

Paul Revere by Isaac, age 10

Paul Revere by Ella, age 11

 

Planning for next year

I had an hour in a coffee shop all by myself the other day and I used it to begin a list in my journal in regards to school for next year.  Before the list-making, I prayed that God would lead us, that He would order our steps and make my time effective; that I wouldn't plan or invest time in what we won't end up doing.  I prayed that He would give me wisdom to discern what we can do, what will work for us, and what is important.  I prayed that He would reveal His desires for our school year to me and that He would show me where we can grow and how we can manage our time better.

Then I began jotting things down, focusing on what we missed this past year (or did too little of or things I just want to do more of) and what I see as growth areas for us.

Here is the list I made, with any notes in italics with further explanations:

-picture study  We made it through exactly ONE artist this year, to my chagrin.  This is due to poor planning on my part.
-classical music/composer study
-nature study/science  I'm ordering some Apologia for next year.
-narration  We do a lot of informal narrations, and Ella and I worked on written narrations once a week, but I want to continue to grow in this with all the kids.  It's one of my goals to read up on this in our off-season and get re-inspired.  *Any and all narration tips welcome.  :)
-read-alouds (more reading with little girls); and be more purposeful in choosing books.  I've found this year that a lot of the books in our book bin are our history-related picture books, which aren't of particular interest to the girls.  We own many wonderful books and I just need to put them out.
-more directive time w/ our history read-alouds: discussion, projects
-memory work and retention  Especially retention.  I'm contemplating this system or something like this.
-prep ahead of time: any coloring pages for the kids to color during our reading time
-devotions- work on developing habits for the older kids to be reading the Bible on their own
-handiwork diligence (for Ella)- to see a project through to completion
-Shakespeare
-piano practice- (for Ella)- move to earlier in the day
-Ella- girlhood stuff  I've been perusing this book and trying to figure out how to work some of that into Ella's schooling next year.
-compile a list of classics with Mark that we'd like the kids to read before they leave our home
-read inspiring books myself: good literature/classics and homeschooling encouragement.  Right now I'm reading both A Thomas Jefferson Education and A Charlotte Mason Companion (both excellent!) and have been reminded again how important it is for me to read books that encourage and inspire me in the education of my children.
-compile assigned reading lists for Isaias
-schedule less read-alouds for me to get through with the kids- Now that we're nearing the end of our school year I'm realizing that I have way too many history read-alouds to get through.  Better to schedule less and then add on as we go.

So that's the list.  This list will surely be added onto and then eventually will morph into another list, than another... and eventually it will become a TO DO list that I'll start checking off.  Mark and I already had a long conversation about the above list, me sharing with him what I see as our growth areas and asking him to think and pray about these things with me [and help me find solutions!]

* * *

Regarding one of those list items, read inspiring books myself:  I would love to hear some of your favorites.  Many of you who read here are also homeschooling mothers.  Are there books that you keep going back to for homeschooling inspiration or encouragement?  Also, what books do you recommend for young moms who are either newly considering homeschooling or beginning their homeschooling journey?  Let's get a good list going in the comments.  I know there are readers who would appreciate this!

Musings on our weekly school schedule

A friend asked me recently if I was as prepared for school this year as I was last year. 

Um, no.

Absolutely not.  ~smile~

We're into our our 7th week of school and I'm still tweaking our weekly schedule.  (See how everything is in pencil?  Yeah.  I'll get out the Sharpies when I'm ready to make it permanent.)

You can click on the photo if you want to see it more clearly.

Being as planned as I was last year made me a little crazy.  Mainly because we were usually running ahead of my meticulously-planned-check-the-little-boxes schedule and so each day I was looking at things on the schedule that we weren't actually DOING on that day and arghh! that frustrated me.

I just feel more relaxed about our schedule this year.  Or maybe the relaxed-thing comes with the fact that I've done this for a handful of years, now.  Or maybe it's a reaction to being overly planned last year.  Who knows?  All I know is that this year I'm probably the LEAST planned of any other year.

For example, I have Picture Study written down for Mondays.  But we haven't even done Picture Study once, because I still haven't selected an artist to study.   (And shh!  So far the kids haven't mentioned it!)  (Recommendations welcome.  We've done Rembrandt, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Carl Larsson,  Norman Rockwell, and maybe a few others but those are the ones I remember right now.)  While I'm on the topic of Picture Study, have you seen these Picture Study Portfolios from Simply Charlotte Mason?  They're great!  I used one of those last year, for Rembrandt.   I know.  Why don't I just order up another one of those for this year, you ask.  I just don't want to study the other artists they offer quite yet.  :)

So... total tangent, there.  Back to Picture Study on our schedule:  We'll get to it.  I'm sure inspiration will hit soonish. 

I'm also still trying to figure out when it works best to do Dictation and Written Narration with Ella, so I keep moving it to different days and trying it on for size, so to speak.

What do I love this year, so far?  Sitting down and learning Latin with the kids.  It's just as new to me as it is to them, and I love that!  I've also been practicing cursive right along with Ella and Isaac and that's one of my favorite things.  I always love reading aloud and we're doing lots of that.  [I'm currently reading Opal Wheeler's Frederic Chopin biography- the one on the left in the picture below.  If I haven't mentioned lately how much we enjoy Opal Wheeler's composer biographies, there you have it.]  The kids color while we read and afterward, while they're finishing up their coloring, I pull up some Chopin from Pandora and we call that Composer Study.

We're also doing Training Hearts Teaching Minds each morning and I'm really enjoying that so far.  We're reading through the Proverbs together out loud- Ella and Isaac and I take turns (and very soon Isaias should be ready to tackle it with us: he is reading so.much.better!!!)

All that to say that we're having a great school year even though it's not all fully planned out and I'm really quite content being so relaxed about it all. 

2010-11 Year in Review: Picture Study

Picture Study

Sheesh. Now that I have a whole blog post devoted to what we did for Picture Study this year, I realize that I don't have much to say* other than:

We studied Norman Rockwell this year.

We have a couple of oversized books on Norman Rockwell and I just went through and selected several of his paintings and we studied them. (You can read more about how we do Picture Study here and here.)

Norman Rockwell has literally thousands of paintings-- I didn't realize just how substantial his body of work is until we started studying him. This man was putting out a brand-new painting weekly for the Saturday Evening Post. That's an astounding accomplishment for a painter.

No Swimming, 1921

What I liked: Norman Rockwell is an incredible artist, and his paintings have a photographic quality that I love. His attention to detail is so realistic that some of his paintings almost appear to actually be a photo. His paintings are like a snapshot capturing an ordinary moment in time: parents tucking their children into bed at night, a grown son home from the war, peeling potatoes with his mother working beside him, a family piled into the car. Rockwell had a gift for capturing the joys and adventures of childhood. (My kids loved his work.) I liked the fact that I was able to easily select paintings for different seasons of the year.

Freedom From Want, 1943

The Problem We All Live With, 1964

Oh! I almost forgot to tell you about my favorite addition to our Picture Study this year:

This cookbook holder-stand-thingamajig. (I don't actually know the appropriate term for this tool.) I spotted this one day at Target and knew it was the perfect thing to hold our picture study books.



See? So handy! No more trying to hold these large books open to the right page while trying to hold a squirmy child or having to continually prop the book up only to have it fall right over again. Loved this. On the days we did Picture Study (once a week. That's for you, Michelle!), it sat on our table, and on other days I set it top of our piano~ open to the most recent painting we'd studied or another one in the book that we weren't going to study, just so that the kids could see more of Rockwell's work.

*clearly I didn't have much of a problem coming up with something to say, now, did I?

I want to add that when I was planning for this year, I only selected Norman Rockwell works through the month of February. At the time I figured I would simply select another artist sometime before the end our Rockwell study (or take a few weeks break and then resume) and we'd finish out the year with another artist. Not so. It just never happened. (Note to self: plan ahead.)

Picture Study

We had a lively Picture Study discussion this morning about this piece of news: Five Masterpieces Stolen in Paris.

We viewed each painting, talked about how rare they were, talked about museums, and thieves~ and (most exciting to the kids): "How would you go about investigating this crime?"

It was quite fun to hear their ideas! [Isaac will be looking for footprints, Ella will be looking for a glove the thief may have left behind.]

And then we talked about DNA for awhile.

Very fun!

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas

The Italian artist Caravaggio. One of my favorite artists. We haven't studied him yet, though.

This morning for our Bible time we read about Thomas. I always get tearful when I read the account of doubting Thomas. And always this picture comes to mind:


So we skipped our scheduled study of Vermeer and looked at this painting instead.

Picture Study Q & A

A couple of you had questions following my post on Picture study, so rather than hide those responses in the comments, I thought I'd take some time here to answer those questions and provide some more resources.

Q: Do you print the pictures for the photo album yourself, or send them to a place like the Costco photo lab?

A: I get them printed at Costco. If we had a good color printer and photo-quality paper, I'd do it here. But we don't, so I send them to Costco.

Q: How do you choose your art?

A: I have several favorite artists I remember from college classes or from traveling, so I have a list in my brain that I'm anxious to study with our children. At this point my goal is to keep our study to artists and paintings that are age-appropriate for my children. At this season, that means scenes of children and families or activities they're familiar with or interested in.

Ambleside Online is a wonderful resource, particularly for those of you who may be at a loss for which artists and which paintings to consider for your study. Follow that link and you'll find a wealth of information!

Q: Where do you get your art from?

A: I have found most of our books at either a local used bookstore or Goodwill. The book we got on Winslow Homer was $2.99 at Goodwill. The book I bought on Mary Cassatt was $9.95 at my favorite used bookstore. If I see a book on an artist I like and think we will study someday, I pick it up.

I have also seen reasonably-priced books on the bargain shelves at Barnes & Noble. Just recently I was there and on an end-cap they had a series of large books on various famous painters. [Think: oversized paperback or hardcover books]. They were marked down to $6.99 each or something. I didn't happen to want any of the particular artists they had left, but at one time they had several artists I would have been interested in. (I just didn't get there soon enough!) If all else fails, there is Amazon.

I like to have a print in hand to examine, but you could certainly do picture study simply by pulling a painting up on the computer and looking at it on your screen, too.

***

I gleaned almost all of my how-to-do-this ideas from Linda Fay at Higher Up and Further In. Linda Fay's blog posts schooled me when we initially began doing Picture Study. The link above will take you to all of her Picture Study posts.

One last thing. Recently I came across a list of questions to use in Picture Study. (I'm not sure who to credit as the author of this list, so please let me know if you happen to be familiar with the source, so that I can give proper credit.) I thought it might be a good resource for those of you who'd like to try this but don't exactly know what to ask. There are some great questions in the list below. My encouragement to you would be to keep it simple. Choose maybe 1 or 2 questions each time, or choose your favorite questions from this list and rotate them, a couple at a time, each time you study a painting.

DESCRIBE IT

1. What kinds of things do you see in this painting? What else do you see?
2. What words would you use to describe this painting? What other words might we use?
3. How would you describe the lines in this picture? The shapes? The colors? What does this painting show?
4. Look at this painting for a moment. What observations can you make about it?
5. How would you describe this painting to a person who could not see it?
6. How would you describe the people in this picture? Are they like you or different?
7. How would you describe (the place depicted in) this painting?


RELATE IT

1. What does this painting remind you of?
2. What things do you recognize in this painting? What things seem new to you?
3. How is this painting like the one we just saw? What are some important differences?
4. What do these two paintings have in common?
5. How is this picture different from real life?
6. What interests you most about this work of art?


ANALYZE IT

1. Which objects seems closer to you? Further away?
2. What can you tell me about the colors in this painting?
3. What color is used the most in this painting?
4. What makes this painting look crowded?
5. What can you tell me about the person in this painting?
6. What can you tell me about how this person lived? How did you arrive at that idea?
7. What do you think is the most important part of this picture?
8. How do you think the artist made this work?
9. What questions would you ask the artist about this work, if s/he were here?


INTERPRET IT

1. What title would you give to this painting? What made you decide on that title?
2. What other titles could we give it?
3. What do you think is happening in this painting? What else could be happening?
4. What sounds would this painting make (if it could)?
5. What do you think is going on in this picture? How did you arrive at that idea?
6. What do you think this painting is about? How did you come up that idea?
7. Pretend you are inside this painting. What does it feel like?
8. What do you think this (object) was used for? How did you arrive at that idea?
9. Why do you suppose the artist made this painting? What makes you think that?
10. What do you think it would be like to live in this painting? What makes you think that?


EVALUATE IT

1. What do you think is good about this painting? What is not so good?
2. Do you think the person who painted this do a good or bad job? What makes you think so?
3. Why do you think other people should see this work of art?
4. What do you think other people would say about this work? Why do you think that?
5. What grade would you give the artist for this work? How did you arrive at that grade?
6. What would you do with this work if you owned it?
7. What do you think is worth remembering about this painting?

School during breakfast, Part 2: Picture Study

I've shared a little about our hymn study here and about our Monday Hymn Practice here.

On Tuesdays we do picture study, and it's one of our favorite things! I was an art major in college and Art History was one of my favorite classes ever.

As to how we incorporate this into our week, I first choose an artist and purchase a book or some prints. [I've been able to purchase some good art books at used bookstores for this very purpose.]

Here's what the study part of that looks like at our house:

ONE: Announce the name of the artist you're studying, and any information (biographical) you think is pertinent. I usually write the artist's name up on the board, and read a short bio or a few facts I've found about the artist.

TWO: Pull out a print, hand it to a child. For the sake of this example I'm going to say I hand the picture to Isaac. Then I ask him to describe what he sees. The rest of us listen and try to imagine the painting in our minds. He does so. My children all love this part. Seriously, they fight over who's turn it is to describe the painting.)

THREE: When he has finished describing the painting, the rest of us get the opportunity to pepper him with questions about the things our minds are still wondering about.

The questions you may ask depend not only on the painting but also on how well your describer is. Our Isaac gets very detailed about what is going on in the painting (think: the story of it; what he imagines is happening), but he may forget to tell us what colors he sees, or what time of the day he thinks it is. Ella, on the other hand, will describe in detail the colors and pattern and folds of the skirt a woman in the painting is wearing but may forget to tell us what is happening.

A few ideas for questions:

What colors/shapes do you see?

How would you describe the people in this painting? [Dress, expression, position, etc]

What do you think is the most important part of this picture?
What is the focal point?/ Where is your eye drawn to?

What objects seem closer to you? Further away?

If you were to choose a title for this picture, what would you call it?

FOUR: Then Isaac reveals the picture to us and we all take turns making comments, things like:

Good job describing the boat, Isaac. That's exactly how I pictured it.

Oh! You forgot to tell us about those flowers there in the corner.

FIVE: Finally, I tell them what the name of the painting is.

The following week we begin all over again with a new painting by the same artist, and we review any of the paintings we've previously learned.

I usually select 5 or 6 paintings per artist (either my favorites or those that I think might be of particular interest to our children), and then we move on to a different artist.

A couple of other ideas:

1. Hand your child some paints or colored pencils (or crayons!) and tell them they get to color that painting!

This is one of the paintings we studied, early last year:


And here is Ella's representation of it:


2. Begin an art album for your child.


We bought a small photo album for Ella two years ago and have printed out the various paintings we've studied and she has added them to her album, listing the title and artist beside each one. She loves this!

{Pictured: page one of Ella's art album}