Real First Snow, and Starting Art Study

 

This is today's view of our house from outside.   Seems like just a week ago I was wearing T-shirts and skirts in northern California because it was too hot for long sleeves.  Oh, that's right.  It WAS just a week ago.

One good thing about the early onset of snowy weather is that it sets me into project and studying mode.   On the homeschool front, things are going very well right now.   We aren't doing a LOT, but what we are doing seems to be clicking fairly well.  

Now that I have gotten rid of so much of my extra homeschooling stuff, I am trying to make a habit of going through what's left often so I don't forget what I want to use.  If I find there is still too much, I am going to discard still more, and so on until I get to the point where it isn't an Augean-stable type job to sort through my resources.   Today I found our old Child-Size Masterpieces.    There is an exercise you can do where you group paintings by artist/style.   In this set, there are twelve water/boat paintings -- four by Winslow Homer, four by JMW Turner, and four by Paul Signac.   The boys were able to easily sort them into three groups.   I thought this would be a good way to informally kick off our art study for the year. 

Here are some places online that I found for art study -- our focus will be on Byzantine and Medieval art mostly. 

• A good Squidoo page:  Artist Study -- Charlotte Mason style Lots of links and good basic information.
• Practical Pages:  Art Ideas -- what a beautiful blog, and lots of printables and ideas.  
• Garden of Praise:  Famous Paintings, Art Appreciation.     I found this site last year, and really like it. 
• Middle Ages Artists -- a more schooly site, but names some of the more famous medieval/early Renaissance artists and summarizes their contributions to art. 
• Medieval Art -- wikipedia article, good starter information.   It divides into periods, which is helpful to me for further googling.

Organization of resources so I don't forget them is an ongoing challenge -- right now I'm using the container or basket method.    Oh, and the picture-taking method.... a combination of the two has worked better for me than anything else, in the past. 

Today we read a bit more of Lamb's version of The Tempest (not so much fun as the actual play IMO) and then we reviewed a bit of Before Christ history to get ready for our proper start in the early, post-Pentecost church.  To review the Pentecost and subsequent early Christianity, I read to them from a book called Founders of Freedom.   Paddy was standing on his head on the couch for part of the reading, but still seemed to be able to retain most of it.    He liked the quiz questions at the end of the chapter.   Easier than narration ;-).