Category Archives: Biographies

Books We Love

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We’re sorting through our shelves today and after some recent talks with friends I wanted to post a photo of some of the books I especially love to talk with kids about a variety of topics – cultural and religious differences, race & ethnicity, gender, strong women role models, etc. I’m not linking to all of them because there are lots. 🙂 But these are some I enjoyed enough to own (and collected a lot through the library used book store and Paperback Swap.)

Some of these were birthday gifts for the kids from us, friends and family as well. Oh, and Scholastic book sales!

photo 1

photo 2

photo 3

Obviously there’s some overlap, there are religious books about strong women (Miriam’s Cup) and a book with a female heroine but it’s about segregation in the south so I’m just lumping them all together into wonderful books for your family library. I left out some books like our biographies book that has a really good split of female and male figures, but these were just the ones that jumped out at me as coming from lists we liked for cultural and gender teaching to kids.

What books would you suggest?

(Oh, Olivia & The Fairy Princesses is included because she goes through strong female role models she could be and different careers she could pursue and ends with deciding even better than a princess is the queen – because she rules. 🙂 )

Artist Study Outline – CM

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2007-2008 TERM 1 Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) Italian High Renaissance (composers: Russian National)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/L/leonardo.html
A lovely website of DaVinci’s art
Notebooks, translated into English
     1. Genevra, which is in the NGA 1474-1476
     2. The Virgin of the Rocks 1483-86
     3. Lady with Ermine 1483-90
     4. The Last Supper 1498 “One of the most complex paintings in the Western tradition in depicting
          a variety of psychological reactions and internal states all focussed on asingle, non-reacting center,
          the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. In thebewildering variety of reactions immediately following Jesus’s
          announcement of his coming betrayal, Leonardo in visual terms manifests what Pico della Mirandola
          and others were saying about the variety and unpredictability of human beings.” See more here.
     5. Mona Lisa 1503-06  detail and text
     6. Self-portrait c. 1512
Book suggestion: Katie Meets the Mona Lisa, by James Mayhew.
     (For Canadians: This picture book also appeared in The Art Issue of Chickadee magazine,
     a special issue which still shows up regularly at yard sales.)
Video suggestion: “Leonardo: A Dream of Flight,” one of The Inventors’ Specials by Devine Entertainment.
For special interest: Study of Cat Movements and Positions 1517-18

2007-2008 TERM 2 Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) Dutch Baroque (composer Handel, Baroque)

2007-2008 TERM 3 Jan Van Eyck (1395-1441) Flemish Northern Renaissance (composer Saint-Saens and Berlioz, Early Romantic)

2008-2009 TERM 1 (?) (composer Bach, Baroque)

2008-2009 TERM 2 (?) (composer Liszt, Romantic)

2008-2009 TERM 3 Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Dutch Post-Impressionist (composers Mahler and Bruckner, Late Romantic)

2009-2010 TERM 1 Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520) Italian High Renaissance (composers Vaughan Williams and Elgar, 20th Century British)

2009-2010 TERM 2 John Singer-Sargent (1856-1925) American (composer Grieg and Sibelius, nationalists)

2009-2010 TERM 3 Claude Monet (1840-1926) French Impressionist  (composer Ravel, Impressionist)

2010-2011 TERM 1 Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) Italian Renaissance (composer Beethoven, Classical/Romantic)

2010-2011 TERM 2 Caravaggio (1571-1610) Italian Baroque (composer Vivaldi, Baroque)

2010-2011 TERM 3 (?) (composer Chopin, Romantic)

2011-2012 TERM 1 Jean Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) French Rococo (composer Mozart, Early classical/Rococo)

2011-2012 TERM 2 (?) (composer Mendelssohn, Romantic)

2011-2012 TERM 3 Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)  American Illustrator (composer Bartok and Hindermith)

Language for C

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Because he’s finished the fourth grade First Language Lessons I’m working to create a new curriculum for C’s language.

Weekly:
Mon – write out scripture in cursive, practice memorization
Tue – new spelling words in cursive (SWR)
Wed – report, one paragraph written on topic from previous week: art, music, literature, history, science, biography, or book he’s reading (does not have to be cursive) (IEW S&S)
Thur – listen to literature reading & narrate (TTC – storycharts)
Fri – spelling test in cursive (SWR), listen to history & narrate

Monthly:
One page report that he’s picked the topic, researched, written outline, rough draft, and final draft of at least 3 paragraphs/one page in length. (IEW S&S)

For narrations he has the option of doing them orally or writing them down, whichever he prefers. Next year he’ll be required to write down a paragraph about the literature and the history readings (but can still pick for his weekly report to be about the music, art, science, biography, or a book he’s reading.) I’ll also then be assigning him a topic to write about for his monthly paper and that may be research related or creative writing, and then he’ll do a second that’s his choice.

Language Changes

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C has completed the First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind level 4:

So we’re making some big changes to his language lessons. On Mondays he picks a memorization piece (right now that’s Articles of Faith but it can be a song, poem, scripture, etc.) At some point during the week he has to write out the piece he’s memorizing and on Friday I check to see how he’s doing. He practices it throughout the week.

On Tuesdays he gets his new spelling words, which are getting more challenging but he still rarely gets any wrong so I don’t make him do enrichment for spelling.

On one of the days (he picks – M,T or W) he reads a biography and does a note outline (main topic, three interesting points about the person.)

On the other days I let him pick – journal entry, report on what he’s reading for fun (currently Harry Potter book six), or pretty much any sort of reading/writing of his choosing.

On Thursdays he narrates for me the literature reading (Shakespeare for kids right now) and does a story chart – characters, plot, theme, setting, etc) with all of the kids.

On Fridays he also narrates for me the history reading, does his memorization test, and has a spelling test.

Eventually he’ll do an oral narration, written outline and then formal paragraph for the various reports & readings but we’re working slowly towards that. Since he’s only nine I think one written report a week is enough. 🙂

Sadako & Paper Cranes

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We just finished reading Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and it’s one to explore for sure. It’s the true story of a young girl that survives the bombing of Hiroshima but later dies from leukemia caused by the exposure. It’s geared toward older elementary age but it had even Bennett entranced and the kids kept asking me to read another chapter until the book was finished. They paused me a few times to ask questions, wondering if it was a true story and if she died and who dropped the bomb. It will certainly bring up some tough questions about war and the role America played, along with questions about cancer and death, but it’s well written without being overwhelming for kids. It may overwhelm the adult attempting to explain things. 🙂 This was also significant for us because my paternal grandfather died from leukemia after time spent in Japan while American forces were there during/after the war. His widow receives VA benefits because they said the exposure was the cause of his leukemia, even decades later.

Really good book, and at the end it has directions for children to fold their own paper cranes.

Update: with the current situation in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami I found this CNN article about a classmate of Sadako’s! She became an oncologist in part because of her experience with the effects of radiation on her classmate – good article.

First Biographies – Armstrong & Aldrin

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We read a brief bio today of Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, Jr. and then looked at these images.

This is the book we’re reading, My First Book of Biographies. I decided we’ll read aloud one a week, have the older two narrate, and do an art project or activity related to it. We also put the dates on our timeline.

Update: Here is the picture Christopher drew for this lesson –
Cam