Chopin Composer Study

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.