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Hello Ladies!

I haven't been around the boards much lately... getting stronger and stronger each day as I continue to recover from neck surgery and everything afterwards. I thank all of you for your prayers. Meanwhile, I have been looking through the Preparing Hearts Manual, and getting really excited about next year! Have any of you that are using (or planning to use) Preparing incorporated an Artist/Picture study or composer study to go along with the timeline of Preparing? If so, did you put it together yourself? Find a great resource, books or online? Please share! TIA!

I use Go Fish for Art cards and books for artist study. You can get the set for the time frame you'd like. I think it's from birdcagepress.com. You get an oversized deck of cards that have about 5 works of art from several different artists in that time period. The art work is small, which makes it easy to store. Yet, large enough you can see the details of each one. It's great to actually have it in front of you! If you get the card set only, there is some information about each artist included. If you get the game set, it comes with a book that goes into more detail and is nice to have, but not crucial to the study.

For music study, I use Themes to Remember Vol. 1. All the volumes tell you which time in history and give the chronology of all and summary of each composer. My kids have started picking out classical pieces in cartoons and commercials! They can tell me the name of the piece and the composer for several and we haven't even really gotten started in it yet! This is by far, my top choice for music study. It adds fun and informational lyrics (composer and/or story line of the piece) to the music so the kids remember it-- and mom can too

Butterfly,
I am saying a little prayer right now for your continued recovery from your surgery.

I spent sometime earlier this a.m.replying to your post and then hit the wrong button. I lost the whole e-mail. Oops! I'll give it another go.

We love the fine arts at our house! My background is in theatre education so I love to incorporate composer/picture study. We will be using Bigger next year so I can't necessarily give advice on how to match it up with your timeline, but I can tell you some things we do in our home. I break the year up into quarters. I do one composer and either one artist or picture study per semester. So 2 composers and 2 artists or art books a year. We do it once a week for an hour. Once a week makes it seem manageable.

For composer study I use Classical Kids and The Story of.... in Words and Music cds. I also check out books and videos from the library on each composer. We read or listen to a selection a week. I begin each time with a review of what we talked about the week before. I also like Coloring the Classics and narrations for notebooking. I second the comment on Themes to Remember by Marjorie Kiel Persons. You could easily use this with CHOW. It has all the major composers and musical periods from 1600-present. It comes with info and a picture of each composer. It also has a cd with each composer's most popular pieces with optional lyrics to remember it by. It also has a timeline to help remember when each musical period and composer happened in history.

For picture study I mostly use the Come Look With Me series. They have books that have corelated to US history but I am not sure what they might have for world history. We look at a picture a week and answer the questions. Usborne does have a book that covers art from Ancients to present called Usborne Introduction to Art (You might look through this first for questionable pics). In the past I have chosen an artist a semester and checked out books from the library on our artist. Then I buy Dover painting postcards, artist color books, and stickers for our artist. I give the ds's a postcard a week. We post them on their desks or on the kitchen table. We look and talk bout them for the week. We paint our own pictures, use the Dover copies, or narrate for a notebook. I also buy plastic slip covers that hold postcards to put in the notebooks for them to store their postcards. Karen Andreola's CM Companion has great ideas on this and composer study.

We also like to go to the art museum. I let the ds's look and we talk about the paintings. I do not read or make them listen to the commentary. I just tell them the artist and let them decide what the picture is about. We like to go to symphony in the park and our sypmphony school field trip day aswell. Both once a year.

Please note that composer/picture study is not always executed the way it's planned in our home. When life get's crazy it just gets skipped over. But, we love it when we do it. Hope this helps.

Blessings,
3musketeers

Well, I don't have lots of extra time to creatively pull pieces together, but we have previously enjoyed resources from homeschool in the woods: http://www.homeschoolinthewoods.com/HTT ... posers.htm
This spring we have successfully finished the OT activity "paks" by scheduling a lapbook day 1x per week for 2 months with another family. My 7 year-old liked a lot of it, but there was also a lot that didn’t really help make any connections for him; however, the purpose of creating a lapbook is a lot like a timeline – a resource for learning, but also a resource for reviewing. My 11 & 12 year olds loved it! With the “paks” you still are on your own to find your own living books and resources from your library. So, in my humble opinion I think this would be great for kids in the extension age group but it may be too much detail, work and information for some children making the whole lapbooking process frustrating for both you and your child! I plan to do the Composers lapbook when we begin Preparing and slowly work on it throughout the year as a fun-lets-do-something-different-but-still-count-it-for-school day or morning or afternoon…

I also found that Beautiful Feet books has a Classical Music unit study that looks very easy to follow and very interesting. Looks like it would not add too much time and no real planning for you. I think I'll use it next year (not this fall, but next)

LOTS of great info here! Thanks so much to all the contributors. I'm busily bookmarking for further study.