ThadenPierce School

Did you know this about the Statue of Liberty?

Freedom is not standing still. A symbolic feature that people cannot see is the broken chain wrapped around the Statue’s feet. Protruding from the bottom of her robe, the broken chains symbolize her free forward movement, enlightening the world with her torch free from oppression and servitude.

We’re going through some posters I found at the Dollar Tree long ago and found one with the Pledge of Allegiance. It has a photo of the Statue of Liberty on it so we’re reading about it.

Though C wants to know what her pointy crown symbolizes and I’ve not found that out yet.

OH, found it – the 7 spikes represent the seven continents and seven seas. At least according to Wikipedia.

We were scrolling through this link of images to find one from the Limbourg brothers (our artist for today.) Christopher saw another image and said, “Hey, that’s Giotto’s!” I checked and he was RIGHT!

I’m so impressed.

For those of you without broadcast television, Kit just told me that Hulu has a variety of Sesame Street clips which are ideal for keeping your child distracted while you ignore them long enough to blog about said children.

We have a planner someone gave us that’s designed for a classroom teacher. It’s a spiral bound book simply filled with lots of squares: days of the week and six sections for subjects. These are big squares so I use one section per day (instead of per subject.) I started using this planner to write out what we were going to be doing each day, detailed plans by subject and child, covering several weeks (months?) ahead of schedule.

That totally flew out the window. Something would come up and throw our schedule off and I was left trying to cross off this, circle this, reschedule this, move this here. It was a hassle and when I didn’t get to something I would feel bad, even though we had covered other things that day.

SO, we tried something new. I am using the same planner but now I write down what we did that day after the fact. The kids’ math, history, and language books are easy, I know we need to do the next day’s lesson. For art, music & science I keep a list of things we’ve done or want to do and just check them off as I add them into the planner. If something comes up (doctor visit, sick child, friends over) then I include that in the planner.

This system works MUCH better for us. By writing down at the end of the day what we did get done, I have an idea of what we’ve covered, Kit can glance at it to see what we last did if he is handling lessons that day, and it gives us greater flexibility over our scheduling. We still record our progress in this way and I can make notes for concepts we need some extra work on, but we’re not dealing with a rigid lesson planner now and that makes me much less stressed.

I’m keeping this for Christopher and Moira right now, as we start working with Bennett in another year or so I’m not sure if we’ll expand the current system or start something new – perhaps one page per child so I can go into greater depth over what they’ve covered. They will also be keeping their own portfolios with schedules once they hit 8 years old or so, but I’ll still want my copy of the lessons covered as well.

I’m trying to start this now so come next January it’s habit.

We’re using Discovering Great Artists for very brief bios on artists and kid friendly art ideas related to the artists. We’ll be going into more depth for artists the kids seem interested in and using the Annotated Mona Lisa for another reference.

There’s a link to the left for more images online for the artists in Discovering Great Artists.

The plan is that every Monday we’ll discuss a different artist from now until January. We may then pick an artist per month for next year and as they get older we may try the Ambleside suggestion to do an artist per term. (That may be high school level.) But for now, it’s just one per week.

I’m not sure how to do the musician study, Thursdays is our music day and I’m still searching for a good guideline for which composers in which order. Tips?? We plan to do a musician per month and use Pandora as a resource for listening to pieces.

Eventually, when I get more organized, we’ll be adding a poet as well. Wednesdays is our poetry reading now and I’m just doing children’s poems, Mother Goose, A Children’s Garden of Verse, and so on… stuff that appeals to kids. Shel Silverstein.

For now we’re doing a very brief intro for these artists and just writing down in their notebooks who we are studying. As time goes by I will have them do much more in depth work – bios, examples of work, so on for the artist, composer & poets each term.

Here are some other artist resources:
- Eyewitness Art series by Colin Wiggins
- The Famous Artists series
- The First Impressionists series
- Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists by Mike Venezia
- Mommy, it’s a Renoir
- Talking with Artists by Pat Cummings
- Weekend with Picasso series
- Women Artists for Children series

But if you have ideas for a good outline for musicians, please let me know. I know nothing so very, very basic is a good place to start. Ideas??

Update: Thanks to an Eric & Abby tip, here is a start based on the First Discovery Composers series -
Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Handel, Chopin, Schubert, Debussy, Vivaldi, Berlioz, Purcell

UPDATE: I asked about this on our main blog and got some wonderful responses, you can see answers to this question over here. Great tips for anywhere and some good ideas specific to the DFW area.

For our history group we’re studying Ferdinand and Isabella and the activity was to make crown jewels, like what Isabella sold for the Columbus voyage. The kids had a blast, it was a great activity for everyone from the 2 year old up to the 7 year olds.

We’re a work in progress, the schedule is changing again…

Now that Mo is in speech MW and soccer WF and Spirit Horse F, she’s a busy girl! And Christopher has soccer WF and Bennett has horses F and everyone has history on Tuesday… but the therapies and soccer are just for spring, in the summer they stop and in the fall it starts up again.

Summer is our quiet time and it’s HOT so I’m finding we get far more lessons done in June, July, August and December, January, February. But March, April, May and September & October we spend busy with therapies and sports and horseback riding and the weather is so nice that we don’t want to do lessons – we want to go play.

So I’m shifting my expectations and while our commitments outside of the house are more strenuous (and while the weather is so nice) we’re going to do a lighter school schedule. Then in the hot summer months when it’s unbearable to go outside by 9am we’ll be doing more lessons. And in the winter when park days can’t happen, we’ll buckle down again. For now, we’re going to enjoy the gorgeous weather and park days and fun.

Monday: grammar lesson for C, speech & reading for Mo, art for everyone. Read aloud bio re: artist or musician while they do projects.
Tuesday: read history & have Christopher write narration; Mo grammar lesson, history group.
Wednesday: grammar lesson for C, speech & reading for Mo, soccer for both of them. Storytime & activity with littlest three while older two are at soccer with Kit. Read aloud poetry to all.
Thursday: C do book report. Mo grammar lesson, piano lesson for both of them. Read aloud from Circling the Globe, kids can color map or flag from country while we read (print off blackline maps.)
Friday: Mo practice speech homework, read me story. C do grammar lesson -or- something else?? Horseback riding for Mo & Bennett, soccer for Mo & C. Special project with Ben & Emy while big kids gone. Read aloud Shakespeare for kids.
Saturday: science experiments and handicrafts.
Sunday: journals & letter writing, review next week’s plans with Kit & C review his goals list.

Book Reports can be from:
- Shakespeare
- book he’s reading
- Circling the Globe
- My First Book of Biographies
- artist or musician studies