Using the DSO site we’re listening to each of the instruments by family (doing strings today) and the children learn a bit about them, listening to pieces and now we’re drawing pictures of which is their favorite.
M & B’s favorite is the harp, we’ll see if we can get a photo of those.
E just being cute:
We’re emptying the sunroom to turn it into a dance studio for the summer:
A friend minored in dance in college and offered to do an intro course for our collection of kids. My Mom helped find clothes & such and we’ll host it in our sunroom. Good incentive to tackle this pre-baby, the sunroom needed some sorting out.
I’m excited, this will be a low stress way for the kids to try a new activity and it’s at our place (bonus) and it’s FREE! (Double bonus.) Plus I knew some of our kids would not be interested in a formal class and others would not do so hot in a traditional class between attention span, sensory and/or motor issues, and we certainly couldn’t afford dance class for five kids so I’m feeling very blessed to have this chance for them – and grateful we have such a fantastic sunroom. Now we just need lots of mirrors, hmmm… 🙂
Preview for tomorrow, they’re trying on their outfits:
We joined the Dallas Symphony Orchestra Kids program and the kids packets arrived today. We’ll watch the movie this morning and tell you how it is!
Subscription form here and it’s free to join.
These ideas came from here and a few other articles on that site. I’m compiling them…
– Ask children how the music makes them feel, encourage them to dance to it.
– Make art while listening, have them paint what they think the music says or how they feel about it.
– Learn about orchestras and play games to match the instruments to the right section (brass, woodwind, percussion, strings.)
– Regarding lessons: let the teacher critique, you encourage and cheer.
– If it’s within family/church standards, let them play whatever music they enjoy.
– For the first practice after lessons, sit with your child to make sure they remember what they need to work on for the week.
– Keep lessons brief for little ones, two short practice sessions instead of one long one.
– Don’t overlook the importance (and effort) of theory. I’ll be using some of this to learn about theory myself!
We’ll be using this list for composer ideas after we finish up Mozart. I think we may do a brief overview and do one composer per month, instead of per semester. So that means for the next year we’ll do:
Gabrieli for October.
Bach for November.
Handel for December (that’s fitting!)
Lully for January.
Monteverdi for February.
Vivaldi for March.
Beethoven for April.
Hadyn for May.
Mozart for June.
Berlioz for July.
Bizet for August.
Brahms for September.
Update: Scratch that, I can’t find anything about some of these composers at the library so instead we’ll do time periods for a couple months and see what I can find from the more famous composers. Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic.
I’m really excited to find this lesson plan for teachers that introduces kids to melody, beat, rhythm and harmony. There are other lessons plans as well if you explore here.
We like the Charlotte Mason idea of doing a composer study with the kids per term but they’re too young I think to go very in depth. For now we’re going to do a composer a month or so and this first month will be Mozart. I’m having fun exploring this site from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. It has samples of the works and very kid friendly bios. I’m going to let the kids explore the games section later and we’ll add the composers to our timeline.
So notes from the kids about Mozart: When he was five he could play the piano and the violin. When he turned five he started learning how to write his own music and that’s when he became a composer. (From C.)
Mo says: When he was older his music sounded very good. He wrote 106 pieces. (Actually, over 600 pieces.)
Christopher started his second piano book and we played our first duet together! It was lovely. For your listening pleasure – Duet
FHE:
– Gospel Art Book pictures 1 through 3: Jesus Christ, “The Lord Created All Things” Moses 1:32-33, 39; 7:30; Mosiah 4:9; The Earth, D&C 59:16-21.
– Gospel Art Picture Kit card 100 – Creation/Living Creatures, Genesis 1:20-25; Moses 2:20-25
– Behold Your Little Ones (nursery manual) lesson 7: Jesus Christ created the World for Me. “My Heavenly Father Loves Me” Children’s Song Book 228-9. Plant seed, coloring book included on page 35 to copy. (I believe page 34 is duplicate of gospel art picture card 100? Seeing as the kids shuffled our set and we can’t find card 100. 🙂 )
Art:
– Science Arts p.66 – star window,
– anything from Chapter 5, Earth & Nature
– nature study journal
– tracing our bodies
Music:
– “My Heavenly Father Loves Me” Children’s Song Book 228-9.
– “For the Beauty of the Earth”
– Anything in Children’s Songbook “Nature & Seasons” section, pgs. 228-249.
– Creation songs
– Beautiful World song list.
Nova Clips:
– Life Science
– Earth Science
– Space
Library/Reading List:
– Magic School bus books & DVDs on earth, space & human body.
– The Sky is Full of Stars book
– creation myths books
Social Studies:
– I requested several books of creation myths from around the world so we can discuss with the kids what other cultures, religions and people have believed about creation.
Have you explored the church music site? It’s amazing.
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.