Posted in Artist and Composer Studies

I'm so excited! As you have read previously, I have been reading and reading Charlotte Mason stuff like crazy the past few weeks. I had started doing the picture study about 1-2 months ago by hanging some of Monet's artwork with our calendar. We have talked about it and then one day we read about Monet.

Now I have found another idea to add even more to our picture study! I found this idea on Higher Up and Farther In's blog (link to left.)

I looked on this site and chose Mary Cassatt to be our first artist. Here is the link to some of her artwork.

http://cgfa.dotsrc.org/cassatt/index.html

Then, I copied each one of the 6 pictures we are going to study into my pictures file on my computer. And, I loaded them onto walgreens.com and ordered 4x6's of each of them...1 for each girl. Then, we will put them into our own little Artist album and write the artist and title on each page. I think the girls are really going to enjoy having their OWN copy of the artwork, to look at, to touch, to think about. As we move forward, they will have a little photo album with all the artwork we have studied! What fun!

Basically, what we will do is introduce the picture at the beginning of the week. I will give it to the girls, tell them the name of the artist and the name of the artwork. I will allow them to just look quietly at the picture for a few moments, without me talking about it, giving my opinion of it or describing it for them. I will remind them to do this each day. Probably the 2nd day I will ask them to describe the picture for me - while looking at it! To build language and descriptive words. Maybe by the end of the week we will close our little book and see how much they can remember about the painting. NOTHING formal, NOTHING difficult. That is one of my favorite things about Charlotte Mason - simplicity and gentleness! Yet what wonderful exposure and depth the things the children are seeing and learning about!

One other idea she had on Higher Up and Further In is to put the artwork of the week as your background on your computer, so that your children can see it in another place...so I now have "Sisters" by Mary Cassatt on our computer. I love this picture and thought it would be sweet to start with such an appropriate sweet picture for my little "sisters."