Thursday, August 16, 2007

Our plans this year: Art

I love this book.

We haven't used it yet -- I just got it -- but I love the look of it, love the ideas I've perused, and love the method it employs.

Discovering Great Artists uses the work of the masters to teach techniques as well as art appreciation. Very nice.



Ann Ball's Catholic Traditions in the Home and Classroom: 365 Days to Celebrate a Catholic Year will also fall under "faith studies" and "observing the liturgical year," as well as history. I just got this book, too, and so far, I'm very impressed. There are so many ideas that it will be easy to pick, choose, and plan ahead.




And, especially for Ramona, because she loves St. Francis so much, I found Francis of Assisi: Activities and Coloring Fun for Children. It has paper dolls, coloring pages, connect-the-dots, mazes and puzzles, stories and a poetry activity.

It's enchanting.

Artist of the Month

Last year, I was loosely following some of the ideas for artist studies on the 4Real forum. I love the idea, and it fits beautifully with my informal approach to these kinds of studies. I'm also very grateful to the wonderful moms who took the time to put together the monthly artists and composers. Thank you to Amy, Mary, Sarah, Helen, and Stef for all the work they put into their monthly posts (and to anyone else I'm inadvertently omitting), and thanks to Elizabeth for starting that 4Real ball rolling in the first place.

This year, I'm going to take a slightly different approach. Our artist of the month will be based on various depictions of the Blessed Mother, and the paintings we look at will be a springboard to other works from that month's artist. The pictures above are from an old calendar I saved years ago (those packrat tendencies can come in handy, no?) We'll start with the three above -- Michelangelo, Fra Angelico, and Murillo.


Composer of the month

Same idea as above.

Another old calendar from this packrat.

4 comments:

Lides said...

Oh my, thank you so much for sharing the St. Francis activity book: my River will absolutely love it.

Delete said...

Hi Karen-I am also planning on using Discovering Great Artists this year. We are doing a early American history and a state by state history so I went through the book, selected all of the American artists and then noted their home state. We correlate that artist activity with the state study.

Jenny

Karen Edmisten said...

It's a great book, Beth!

Jenny, I'll be able to tie some of the artists in with our Middle Ages study, too. Don't you love that kind of integration in learning?

Liz said...

I just ordered Ann Ball's book because I am going to be babysitting my nephew's daughter after kindergarten for the first 6 weeks of school. I've been given permission to do catechetics with her (she's pretty totally uncatechized and not even baptized). I was glad to see you're using this one too. Any great suggestions for a crash course in Catholicism for a 5 year old??? I never taught Catholicism to someone this age remember.