We’re in the midst of our fourth week back to homeschool (Sprite’s seventh grade). Despite my terrible motivation issues, it’s been a smooth transition back to books and learning. Like I suspected, once I dive in, the motivation returns. We have done math, language arts, art, and composer study in these weeks — four of our favorite areas. (Okay, math is not a favorite, but it’s necessary.) Eventually I’ll be adding in science and history.

The composer I chose for this term is Chopin, the Polish Poet of the Piano. Listening to his piano music has been a great inspiration for Sprite as she gets back into the swing of piano lessons. (Her teacher takes a break over the summer.) We are still enjoying his music on audio CD, but we’ve already wrapped up the biographical study. These are the resources we used.

Living Books

Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers

Opal Wheeler biographies

• Frederic Chopin, Son of Poland, Early Years
• Frederic Chopin, Son of Poland, Later Years

Notebooking pages

Chopin is not one of the artists available on the freebies page, so I used my purchased composers set from Notebookingpages.com. (No, you don’t need fancy, custom-made notebooking pages. Plain paper works just as well.)

Sprite made written narrations of the Opal Wheeler books, the chapter from Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers and the Chopin VOX disc. She took notes as she listened to the latter two and then worked her notes into written narrations.

Activity Pages

Geography

The printable maps from Scholastic’s Ready-to-Go Super Book of Outline Maps came in handy for integrating geography into our living book studies. As Chopin traveled around Europe, Sprite marked the location on her map of Europe.

Timeline

She made a one page Chopin timeline with the free timeline notebooking page from The Notebooking Fairy.

I made a lens over at Squidoo with more resources. I always find far more than we can manage to use. So visit Chopin Composer Study for a buffet of teaching ideas. Pick and choose what works best for you as you enjoy Chopin.

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I received an email with this question and I thought I’d address it here in a blog  post.

“You both do art and music study. I want to incorporate these because I think they are important; however, he doesn’t seem interested. Should I push this and require it or not?”

[Just so you know, this mom's child is a high school student.]

To start art and music in high school years would be hard if that interest is not there. Young ones are more malleable. That’s why laying the foundation of a love of fine arts is so important.  But I don’t think it’s too late.

I’d hate to force it, but maybe some intentional exposure would pique some interest. For example, have Bach or Mozart playing each day in the background, or lay art prints around on the coffee table. Try to entice him to bite the bait. When he does, you’ll be ready with some spontaneous art or music lessons. (Here are some discussion questions for art & for music you may want to have handy.)

But then again, a narration of a painting is really quick. It takes just minutes. Capitalize on the student’s interests to draw him in. This particular child loves animals, so I suggested that the mom choose an artist who painted a lot of animals. I think that requiring two minutes of focused study on a painting and then two more minutes of verbal narration would not be torture for any child as long as the painting was interesting to him. Look at this list of subject matter, and find an area that would be engaging — animals, children, flowers, history, etc.

Other ideas

• Take a field trip to a museum or go to a concert.
• Use an art calendar as a way to sneak in more art.

What do YOU suggest for introducing a reluctant student to art and music?

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Our latest composer is Beethoven. Sprite deems him a likable child prodigy (different from Mozart). In the past, I’d always read these Opal Wheeler biographies aloud. But they really are easy reads for a fifth grader. So I turned the book over to her this time. (Even though I sort of missed reading it together.)

She chose some of the illustrations to print from the accompanying  CD. And using those drawings plus the composer pages from Notebooking Pages, she created several pages of written and illustrated narration.

Of course, we are periodically listening to some Beethoven CDs to surround ourselves with his music. (You can’t have composer study without the music!)

What made me happiest was that she kept going to the copier/printer and making copies of Beethoven’s music. She said she wanted to try to play the pieces!

At her last piano lesson, she took some of the pieces (and the hymn we are studying) and asked her teacher for help. (I can’t play any instruments or read music, and so I’m absolutely no help at all.) I was so pleased that the teacher was receptive to this kind of request and welcomed Sprite to bring in music she finds interesting.

One piece she liked was called Anger Over a Lost Penny. Isn’t that hilarious? I guess if I wrote music I could name pieces things like

Frustration Over so Many Burned Out Light Bulbs (We’re in one of those phases.)

Forgetting to Defrost the Meat

or

Let’s Just Spend All Day at the River.

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We’ve chosen Giuseppe Verdi as our composer of the term, and Verdi means opera!

I bought this opera DVD (pirated, shhhh….) for less than $2 –Verdi’s Il Trovatore , Metropolitan Opera (1988).   I have to admit, it was my first exposure, ever, to opera. And surprisingly, Sprite and I both liked it!

Granted, it’s totally different from anything we’d ever seen before. Of course there’s the BIG singing, the fancy costumes, and the stage set. We expected all that. What was new to us was the lack of action. The entire story is not just sung but told through song. I mean, when the two men duel, there is aggressive singing back and forth and then literally one strike with the sword and it’s over. The physical action is more symbolic than anything else. The words and the music are what tell the story.

I guess that I have probably read that somewhere about opera. But without seeing it, I just didn’t understand. Thank goodness for the (pirated) DVD recording. Without it, our understanding of opera would be quite deficient. Living books are good for most learning, but some things must be seen, touched, heard, and felt. Opera is obviously one of them.

Then we watched Verdi’s Otello (Othello), also by the Metropolitan Opera. This one was doubly good. First of all it was Shakespeare. (That means I checked off both Shakespeare and composer study in one fell swoop. Yes, I love marking things off my list!) Secondly it was much more engaging as far as action. The characters moved about on stage and physically interacted far more than our first opera.

Oh, the story of Othello is terribly sad, a true tragedy which the music accompaniment heightens considerably. And what a lesson about jealousy, about choosing friends carefully, and about open communication.  So it’s all a fabulous learning opportunity. Although the story was much darker, Sprite and I preferred Otello to Il Trovadore.

In true Charlotte Mason form, the focus is on the music, not the composer himself. So we’ve done nothing about Verdi the man yet, but I plan to let Sprite read this biographical sketch  at Lesson Snips.  We also have an audio CD about Verdi that we’ll listen to and take notes on. But for now, we’re enjoying the operas. We still have one more to go, Falstaff (based on a Shakespearean character).

If you want the nitty gritty, you can visit Giuseppe Verdi Composer Study where it’s all laid out in detail. (Notebooking pages and a minibook too.)

And here’s a simple lapbook we did about opera. I even made the minibooks into templates which I printed and gave to Sprite. This is not our usual way of creating a lapbook. But I believe in variety.

Opera Lapbook Cover

Opera Lapbook Open

And all the printables for the minibooks can be found both on my HSLaunch page and on this Squidoo lens — Opera for Children (which links to the resources you need to fill in the minibooks).

Here are a few glimpses of a few of the minibooks. It’s a simple lapbook with only eight minibooks. And we did the whole thing in a week. That’s not our lapbooking norm either, but it’s good to make a quickie every now and then. My point was to reinforce the key aspects of opera, not to drag it out into a full length unit study. So this worked well.

For more photos, visit the Flickr Set of Opera Lapbook pics.

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Sprite doesn’t like Mozart anymore. She always liked his music before we read his biography. But now she doesn’t like him at all. And it’s all because he’s a child prodigy. He’s too perfect. She says she doesn’t like perfect people.

Although I’m a huge fan of the Opal Wheeler composer biographies, I do have to agree with Sprite that the Mozart one is a tad, well, boring. His childhood was so perfect and so charmed that it makes for a lifeless story. Compared to Haydn who worked his way up from poverty to fame, Mozart’s life is just dull. Traveling from one palace to the next, effortlessly churning out composition after composition… sigh. There was no conflict whatsoever to make the story suspenseful.

Sprite seemed to resent the fact that Mozart could crank out musical pieces at ages much younger than her own 10 years. During our study of Mozart I learned that her piano teacher uses Mozart to taunt the students when they haven’t practiced. He says something like, “You can’t play this? How old are you? Mozart was writing music more complicated than this when he was five!” [Thanks, Mr. Piano teacher, for ruining our composer study with a resentment towards Mozart.]

I assume that as she matures, she’ll come around to liking Mozart again. I personally love his music!

We used an assortment of resources — 2 discs I bought locally as well as a disc I brought from America (bought at at thrift store). I got free notebooking pages to record facts about Mozart’s life and music. You can get all the details at Mozart Composer Study.

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We’ve studied Bach this term. It was almost a disaster when I couldn’t find any Bach CDs in our “small” town of 4 million. But Amazon to rescue! I’ve discovered that you can download entire music albums from Amazon for the same price as purchasing one! (Granted, it should be a tad cheaper, but I’m just glad to get instant music.) That really saved our composer study. I mean, how can you study music without listening to music? Rather absurd. I had books and audio with narration interspersed among snippets of music, but not one CD of just Bach’s music. At any rate, the composer study has been saved, and we’re enjoying just listening to the music as we do other things.

I’ve gathered all our resources — books, printables, and audio — at Bach Composer Study.

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We’ve wrapped up another composer — Franz Joseph Haydn. This was our first time to read one of the Opal Wheeler biographies. I love these books! Joseph Haydn: The Merry Little Peasant was a delight to read. And the illustrations are adorable!

I strongly suggest the Opal Wheeler books; they are wonderful living books to introduce children to composers. Reading Haydn’s biography in a narrative like this really helped us understand the composer. Then when I read the chapter from Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers, a much more advanced book, we already knew the basics of his life and Sprite could easily follow the much more condensed synopsis.

I also bought the companion CD to the Wheeler biography. On it are the music snippits that are featured in the text. And even better, the CD has selected illustrations to print and color. I was shocked that Sprite wanted to color every available page! We even photocopied other illustrations from the book that were not on the CD. She has never taken to coloring books; instead she prefers blank paper. But something about this story or the quality of the illustrations made her want to color them.

We used the coloring pages and some free notebooking pages (linked here at Joseph Haydn for Children) to make a nice booklet about Haydn.

Oh, and we’ve started playing the Composers card game! (At $63 you don’t want to buy this from Amazon! But maybe Rainbow Resource has it.)It was one I played as a child, so it brings back a lot of memories. It’s a great way to become familiar with the names and faces of the  major composers from the Romantic and Classical periods.

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