"Ambling" Through Our Fourth Week

Wow! It's amazing how quickly these first four weeks of homeschooling have gone by! Each week we've added a bit to our *core* curriculum of the 3 R's. Week #4 brought "Art & Music Appreciation"...CM style. If you've never been to the Ambleside Online site, take a stroll on over. You'll find an amazing wealth of information on Charlotte Mason, including a free curriculum outline. While our homeschool is not 100% CM, I do find the AO Artist & Composer Studies to be an exceptional addition to our plan for several reasons:

(1) I know diddly about art, artists, art appreciation...you get the gist. After all, I am a CPA. I can do your taxes, but please don't ask me which art movements occurred during the transition from the Renaissance period to Neoclassicism. That's what Wikipedia is for.

(2) I know squat about music, composers, and the like. I did take piano for a few months in the 4th grade. I did a fine rendition of "Blueberry Hill" at my recital...but not quite Carnegie Hall material, if you know what I mean.

(3) The AO Artist & Composer Studies are completely planned out for you. And they are free. Now that's what I call a great combo. Even better than the *Souper Sandwich Combo* I had last night at Red Robin. (Which was fabulous, by the way.) All kidding aside, the thought of choosing which artists/composers, then which works by said artist/composer was just WAY too overwhelming for this left-brained gal. AO does all the work for me. There is even a newly-formed Yahoo group (AOArtPrints) where you can download the artist's works and print them at home. That is very well-suited to my typical planning-for-the-next-thing-at-midnight scenario.

So...to make a long story short...we added in our study of Leonardo da Vinci and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov this week. For those of you who may not be familiar with Rimsky-Korsakov's name, check out this interpretation of "Flight of the Bumblebee." Makes me wish I had taken guitar lessons instead of piano.

Now on to the nuts & bolts of our week...

LANGUAGE ARTS: SWR continues to rock. We finished Section E, and after Grace wrote her "best original sentence(s)" for the week, she quickly ran to get *props* from her room to act it out! {Warning to all long-time SWR users: I allow Grace to use purple pencil to mark the words in her learning log. *gasp*}


We also completed several lessons in FLL this week. Still reviewing nouns...

READING: Grace's independent reading this week was "Frog and Toad Together." And we read the first nine chapters in our new read-aloud, "Little House in the Big Woods."

MATH: We completed Lessons 6-8 in Horizons 2. Then, in preparation for the multi-digit addition that appears in Lesson 9, we did this *fun* worksheet.


HISTORY & SCIENCE: Read Chapter 3 in SOTW1; completed narration & coloring page. Didn't quite get to making our own cuneiform, so that's on the list for this coming week. For science, we studied ants. Lots of reading here: Kingfisher First Encyclopedia of Animals, "Are You an Ant?," "Magic School Bus Gets Ants in its Pants: A Book About Ants," several Aesop's Fables dealing with ants, and "The Ant Bully" by John Nickle. Kind of partial to the last one, since my dh spent 2 years of his life working on the major motion picture. :)


CHARACTER: House rule #5--obey the first time. Favorite reads: "Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore" and "My Own Self."

MEMORIZATION: "Whole Duty of Children" by Robert Louis Stevenson.

And so I bring my rambling for the week to an end. In closing, I leave you with Grace's interpretation of da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" and "Self-Portrait."