I have been reading Poetic Knowledge by James Taylor (no, not the singer) this week. This book has been very inspiring for me. It is a hard read but a neccessary one. This book has motivated me to make some changes in our homeschool.
Poetic knowledge is the opposite of scientific knowledge. Whereas scientific knowledge is facts and information that is put into your head, poetic knowledge is feelings and emotions that are put into your heart. Poetic knowledge comes from knowing and loving various objects, be it a poem, a painting, a piece of music, etc. From knowing these things, your heart is filled by the beauty of it. I will post some quotes from this book later on to explain this better.
Reading this book, though, caused me to think about well I am doing in instilling this kind of knowledge in my children. Before this past year rolled along, I was doing pretty good in this area. We were reading poetry and memorizing it, we were doing picture study and composer study on a fairly regular basis and we were reading about 3 or 4 Shakespeare plays a year. We were doing pretty well. Then last year came along. Everything flew out of the window. I was so focused on getting Rocky reading and getting a handle on Mia's spelling; oh! and don't forget adding in another student, that the poetic side of life crashed and burned.
Mr. Taylor reminded me this past week that we need to get back into the swing of poetic things. I realized in reading his book that i missed reading the poetry and doing picture study. Those things were the fun things of our day.
I have decided that making changes should happen right now. Last night I printed off poems by Longfellow (for Mia) and Christiana Rossetti (for Rocky.) We read them today. I forgot how beautiful it is to read and discuss poetry with my children. We also read a book about Paul Cezanne. Once I get a refill for my colour cartridge, I can print off some of his paintings for study.
I told the kids that we were going to go back to the beautiful things of life. Mia had a great idea on how to handle all of these areas. She suggested that each day we do something different. On Mon. we would do math history, play math games and read math storybooks. Tues. would be for poetry (reciting, copying, etc.) Wed. would be for picture study and composer study. Shakespear would be done on Thursday and birds (our unit study ) would be for Fridays. Now, Mia thought this would be all that we did during the day but I told her that math and reading had to be done every day so as to not forget important points. She was okay with that.
I like Mia's idea, so we will run with this next week. If this works for the summer, we might carry on a similar idea for the rest of the year.