Monday, December 4, 2023
design your homeschool: putting components together (art and music)
The fine arts as it were Arden music. I mean some people forget about art and music but to me it was something that was very important when I was talking about history I mean it just naturally comes up. Art from prehistory to current times what triggered those changes the different types of abstract art the concrete art the impressionism all of that. How could you neglect art and music. Some people forget about art and music because they can't find an art class or they can't find a music program or they think that because they homeschool their children that is completely off the table altogether. It's not for me knowing that aren't in music are critical in understanding the beauty and the ugliness of the world I came up with this concept of how I would approach art and music. Considering that art and music were introduced in theory through history or social studies as it were if we want to use the proper terms for things. I came up with a three-step process. Charlotte Mason brought up the concept of art appreciation. I also learned that concept of art appreciation through my art class at my private school. before we learned how to do certain things like impressionist art or whatever type of genre of art we were studying we would look at a piece of art. We would study that artwork and we would then learn about the artist. Of course I always wanted to dive deeper into the psychology and the sociology and all of that other stuff that goes around the artist because what inspired them what was going on around them to make them paint that. I always love starry night because for me it was imperfect my mind when it comes to art is not as solid as the you know the what is I can't even think of the genre of art that is so technical well I guess I could call it technical art considering that I'm engineer and I had to do a lot of technical drawings that's what comes to mind in my mind but when I come to the appreciation of certain things I had to think about what inspired something like starry night. Anyway so my point is that even with music when introduced to a new woodwind brass instrument the piano which I fell in love with because I can hear the different tones and sounds and things and I loved how a piano was made and I can play by ear but I can't read music it's just that once you learn about an instrument it's good to know what inspired its creation and use. I wanted to find a curriculum that introduced the three step process that I had created but it didn't exist. There are several art programs and music programs for homeschoolers but they don't quite grasp everything that I was looking for. So I went outside of my home I found an art program at the library called artsparks that teaches the theory and a little bit of appreciation for art. Then I found a music program called joyful noise a non-profit outside the home that taught the practice and theory behind music. And my overall fine arts curriculum it has to have three parts. Theory appreciation and practice. The theory of an art form or a music concept is important because it introduces I guess the why it exists in the first place and how it was created in the first place. Charlotte Mason has plenty of things on art appreciation but not very many things on music appreciation. There are a few YouTube channels that allow you to hear the music and different genres of music but there is no curriculum that brings all of those things together. I'm very intrigued about music and tone and vibration because I understand that everything is a vibration. But that's kind of going into a spiritual realm. So I'm not going to go there for this right now but I had also learned in history about social tones and Gregorian chants. And those were supposed to be the purest forms of sound. Don't quote me on that I'm not quite sure but this is going into my memory so I can't remember exactly how it piece together all I know is that I wanted to make sure that I taught them to appreciate what sound what music sounded like before we had T-Pain and Auto tuning. And I wanted them to appreciate art in its earliest form before we came up with bananas duct tape to drywall. How early artists saw colors made their own paints and all of those things it was so important. And I'm happy that I did that because my oldest son really loves art he loves it as a way to express himself in a nonverbal manner. My middle child took that into the musical realm he enjoys different instruments and sounds and how they work together. So I want to say that I did a good job in making them learn the different genres of music and art so that they could figure out how to make their own. I was not allowed to be that creative because I had to be practical but now in this era kids are allowed to be both practical and creative at the same time. I went in the engineering particularly in building houses because I loved creating homes building homes making them look beautiful and putting a feminine touch on a masculine thing. Because in history we learned that men were the ones that build houses they made sure that they were sturdy all kind of look like boxes honestly. So I wanted my children to have a different way to express themselves in so I can't do anything that they can do I can draw and mean technical drawing I can play music by ear but I can't write my own music. I wanted my children to be able to express themselves in a way that I could not and although I learned theory which just intrigues me to this day and I appreciate all that is good and beautiful in the world such as how Charlotte Mason expressed life should be and I learned how to practice art and music. I can play a piano I can paint I can draw I can sculpt I can weld I can would work do a lot of things with my hands I can play the drums I can play the piano I tried to play the violin I'm not very good at it wouldn't recommend it my oldest son is better at it but the point of this whole post was just simply state that when going into art and music in the homeschool try not to forget to introduce the theory of each thing get some pieces to appreciate them in their original form and then you can teach your children about how they evolved and then find pieces that have those original elements in them and then practice making those pieces your own be it in art or music. And when trying to find your homeschool program don't forget about the library don't forget about nonprofits don't forget about finding free art and music programs where you can get the practice they do exist just have to find them and I'm sure if you look they're just a Google way or a trip to the library.
design your homeschool: putting components together (Mathematics)
Mathematics is not the easiest thing to find when it comes to finding a story base curriculum. I will be 100% honest with you I found the perfect curriculum that was story based and my kids loved it the sad part is it was expensive and I couldn't afford it at the time. Hurt my heart but kind of academy was free and hey I got a computer for free so each boy use Khan academy but I still dream of Life of Fred from time to time and how they used to love all those stories from I think we got the first six books from the library. It went all the way through calculus I really love that series I don't know maybe I'll get it for my youngest. Then again maybe not when I mess around with something that works right Khan academy is free can't beat free. Now well I was searching I did find alternatives that were equally is nice beast academy and math and focus when I originally started homeschooling my kids I had signed up for the Calvert program and they use math and focus so for grades kindergarten first and second grade I use math and focus along with the life of Fred books because I liked introducing the concepts like I said before they went to bed and reading them the stories and then I would find the corresponding courses or lessons in the math and focus and then I would give them those pages and we would do drills through math and focus then when they got older by third grade they needed something a little bit more and since beast academy had comic book style things it really did engage my middle child he really likes comic books and anime and all of that so I went with beast academy for him. But again it was expensive so although I really really enjoyed the life of Fred series for math initially I couldn't afford it public housing just killed the math but I would recommend that for anyone using story based curriculum and you want every subject to have a story associated with it life of Fred is awesome and I hope that I am able to gift it to everyone that also enjoys it someday. But I can also say that beast academy with its comic book style is awesome for the advanced learner which my middle child truly gravitated towards and picked up oh my gosh he's so smart. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of beast academy because I have the online version and it's hard to get a screenshot of Khan academy as well to post on here but I'm positive that between Khan academy Junior which my 5-year-old is infatuated with and Khan academy for my older kids of whom my oldest child is infatuated with how easy the lessons are and how short they are you can't really go wrong Khan academy and Khan academy Junior are free. Beast academy they have lessons online and they also have little snippets of their comic books or comic strips and you can see how that story plays out. Life of Fred I believe also has samples and if you go to your library my library had them but I was always constantly waiting for the next available one which I hated waiting because then that messed up my whole flow so it's nice to have that whole series on hand and purchase so that way you don't have to put off math until you get the book in the library but if you're not typing like me and you can wait for the book to come in the library then I would highly recommend you go that route.
So to recap my main choice Life of Fred series. It was available at the public library. Request it if you have too it is worth it.
My second choice since it is a comic style story: beast academy. It is geared towards advanced children but they don't say you can't use it for the average child that like comic books.
My last choice because you can't beat free. Kahn academy. The founder of the site is in love with math and mastering concepts before moving on so no brainer there. Since I had to start working outside the home for a while I didn't dispate using Kahn academy kids for my current five year old. It is addictive because it also has stories, fairitales, games and puzzles. Nest educational app for a device monitored child for the single working parent. Of course don't leave it there bring In real world experiences and conversations. Help the young child understand. Don't let the device do all the work. You are still the parent.
design your homeschool: putting components together (Science)
There was only one choice for me when picking a science curriculum. I wanted to introduce concepts through story. Bedtime is the best time to introduce things. They get to sleep on new concepts and wake with all times of interesting dreams that lead to questions and new investigations. The ages of 10 and 8 for my boys was an adventure for sure. I needed to stick with my classical approach and mastery progression and the only inexpensive choice was elemental science.
the story based course is fabulous for elementary students and since I want them to circle back with deeper understanding when they get older.
they have that too. A no brainier for me. Inexpensive and sticks to my objectives and my children love them . I really don't know what else to say. Integrate DK publishing encyclopedias and timelines on science education gold honestly. I love science because it explains the world. Helps discover the truth by teaching you how to observe from different perspectives to get the big picture and hold faith in a corner. To me science is the basis for my grasp of logical thought. Math is the language of science to verify and prove. But I am math and science nerd to take it with a grain of salt. We learn science when we cook, we learn science when we observe the clouds in the sky. Science like history is everywhere. I remember I bought the boys tablets and installed the solar system app and although we live in a city with light pollution when we held them up to the sky it would show us the constellations that should be there. And on clear nights we could see a few of the stars if not all. Science is a neverending wonder that allows me to be a kid again from time to time.
design your homeschool: putting components together (social studies)
What is social studies? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_studies Wikipedia has a great definition. Considering the reality that social studies encompasses so many discplines it is the greatest place to start when creating a curriculum.
after you learn about how people think, why they think, you have to think about what always bring people together; FOOD! Thursdays were dedicated to trying a new food from a different country. Sitting down they way they would as a family in that country I even bought a Japanese dinning set. 1) because it was compact in my small apartment. 2) it was on sale for like $100 3) it came with dishes and utensils. Amazon is freaking awesome sometimes.
art is fundament when it comes to communication in prehistory. Before we had language we had art. Art history intrigued me in middle school because it gave me the concrete I needed to appreciate the abstract of it all. Why colors would be chosen how the colors were made. What regions of the world created walhat colors from which plants or minerals. I don't have a book on music but that is where I went with my lessons after art. We studied musicians from each region, genres, and why that genre started.
dk publishing books are by far my favorite when it comes to touching all the fields of humanities and social studies.
these are the books in my room my older boys have the others in the series in their rooms. They are being quiet right now and I don't want to bother them to get a picture. Do has every topic covered.
[social studies is the integrated study of multiple fields of humanities, the arts, and social sciences, including history, economics, geography and political science. The term was first coined by American educators around the turn of the twentieth century as a catch-all for these subjects, as well as others which did not fit into the helps the models of lower education in the United States, such as philosophy and psychology] except from Wikipedia link above.
I did all of this when thinking about creating a well rounded curriculum from the start I had no idea it was social studies until I started searching for my resources to teach my children.
History, being story based was a great place to start.
story time with history through story of the world is fun. I love expanding on historical events with different fiction stories. My apartment is too small to hold all the books I have read over the years to take pictures. Some of the books are on Kindle.
when we read about a place it is important to know where it is on a map. In recent years dealing with Google maps. SMH my children needed to know how to read a map and know where they are in relation to the rest of the world. My oldest loves coding and even he learned at an early age that tech isn't perfect. I already talked about philosophy and DK publishing books used to supplement. But I needed a book to help bridge Eastern and western philosophy.
it is impossible to teach a well rounded education if you only focus on one region of the world. Through my own journey it has become clear to me that the only real difference between philosophy is regional based on culture. Modesty verse hedonism if you will. Focus on self improvement verse community improvement. Inward verse outward, but taking care in all you do is the focus of both. Then I discovered the middle path. The balanced path of improving yourself to be more efficient and effective in contributing to the whole. We all live on one planet and our actions impact everyone. But you can't give from an empty cup. Without working on oneself what is there to give.
design your homeschool: putting components together (Language Arts)
I said before that I'm an engineer and I've always excelled at math in school language not so much I am not afraid or embarrassed to say that I did not learn how to comprehend what I was reading until I went to summer school in the 5th grade. And quite frankly I was a little nervous about teaching my children how to read because even though I grew up with hooked on phonics it really didn't help me at all. For my first child I used baby can read books and I'm headed happy to say that he was able to read by mistake a few words by the time he was two. But that was kind of like just sitting down in front of the TV and you know go through some picture books I needed more than that once he got older. So once I started taking it seriously on how to teach my child to read I stumbled upon the best thing on the planet Denise Eide's book: Uncovering the Logic of English. This book was actually so perfect I think it had a passage in here that said there was another engineer that had the same issue that I did and considering my logical brain it makes so much sense breaking things down into 33 rules as opposed to all the rules I learned in school that just confused the crap out of me. And honestly I think it would help all children to learn how to read in some form or fashion in this way because phonetics definitely helped me when I was younger.
And with this lovely book: writing with ease, it taught them the fundamentals.you don't just need to be able to know how to read and then start writing you also need to learn how to put that grammar into practice so although Denise Eide's book was fundamental it's nice to have some extra to go along with it to supplement those lessons in a fun and engaging way. Of course I had to stick with the well-trained mind because why deviate from something that works so well.
Before Denise had published her curriculum foundations and all of that for uncovering or learning the logic of English I was infatuated with I can't even think of the name of the curriculum right now but it was another curriculum that basically had a similar premise but it was focused on sight words I didn't like that at all and Denise has made it so simple with her curriculum for children that I can't live without it I don't know how anybody else would live without it it is so complete and comprehensive I think this is how the world should go moving forward. You can make your own decision but honestly if you were to use my curriculum that I've set out I think it would be so easy and so simple the lessons are short and they're so complete my children loved her writing program so much that my oldest child actually fell in love with calligraphy. So with that being said this broke down learning how to read in such a way that made so much sense to me I don't have to worry about remembering a thousand different exceptions all I need to learn are the fundamental rules and of course it kind of goes into the fact that English is a melting pot of languages. Greek latin Spanish all those languages mixed again to make English which is so true German all of it just mixed in we have words from all over the world in the English language. And that is why I wanted to have a curriculum that is a world view of History language reading writing all of it mixed together. From a business point of view communication is very important and written communication is very important as well so after I had discovered how I was going to teach them how to read and write I needed to figure out how I was going to teach them how to communicate and even though I had classes that taught me that like I said I was not very good at it until about the 7th grade. And if you're going by my blog of which I am dictating into a voice to text program, judge me if you want but you know what copywriting editing all that good stuff we can worry about that later. Right now my focus is getting this information out there to help as many people as I possibly can. Now so when my children got to the point where they were writing I went back to the well trained mine riding with ease which starts with a very early concept of teaching a child how to form grammatically correct sentences at a very young age and it threw in some picture appreciation as well which I loved so they could communicate what they were saying without them having to communicate what they were reading so it helps.
Learn grammar in practice with first language lessons.
Denise's logic of English theory on how to recognize letters, the sounds of this letters, putting those letters and sounds into words, and the rules associated with how to write grammatically, and how to communicate at a young age. Once my children got older and grasp logical thinking we must get back to creative thinking.
classical academic press is the best thing for creative writing but it also includes logical analysis of creative features I guess that's a good way to put it teaches you how to do things in a way that is fluid and it makes sense and allows you to be creative on so many levels that I wish I had been taught this in school.
Design your homeschool: pt 1 start with the end in mind
As an engineer I have learned that when you're designing something it's always good to have the end in mind and then you get all of the components to meet that in goal. Designing your homeschool is the same concept you want to educate your children with an angle in mind that way it doesn't matter what you do in the middle just so long as you do things to get to your end goal. I want my children to have a well-rounded education I wanted my children to have a love of reading. I wanted my children to be able to have conversations with anyone and everyone that they came in contact with on any topic. And honestly that's what a Charlotte Mason style hybrid thing that I'm doing is going to accomplish with all the materials that I've chosen it's going to ultimately end with them having a well-rounded education. I'm trying to get to how I put all of those things together considering that I had to think of what was missing in school and how to add it it took me I'll say about 7 months to figure out and I wish I hadn't lost those blog posts about that journey. Because right now trying to remember how I got to this point it's a little jarring but I think I can get there. When I originally started I kept watching YouTube videos going over this and that curriculum overwhelmed with the idea that I wanted to try every last one of them until I had finally gotten to that point where I said to myself I need to focus on the curriculum that will get me to my end goal. I don't want my children to have a lot of busy work. I do want my children to read instead of constantly writing nonsense. I want them to get concepts thoroughly before they move on to the next. In order for them to do that I had read in the well-trained mind about the Trivium and quite frankly that made so much sense well looking at the classical conversations curriculum and community I realized that they were doing the exact same thing. The only reason why I didn't go with classical conversations is because it was pretty religious. And although I enjoyed the community days I didn't enjoy the focus on religion. And then when classical academic press came out and their school leg groups I thought oh good it's a secular version but then they kept on talking about the liturgy and basically it was just religious without the religion. and I didn't want that at all so I wanted to build something that was like scoli but it was going to be 100% philosophy based. And then I realized I could build a schooling group that was completely secular but then you had fees and stuff associated with that but basically coming up with the name because scolay is Latin for school or the root word for school but it's more laid back and it's exactly what I wanted where it is a lifestyle and it seamlessly integrates into how you educate oneself or your children. And once I discovered that that's how I figured out how I wanted to get to my end goal I didn't want my children to have a whole lot of busy work I wanted my children to actually learn basic concepts and enjoy a lot of reading I wanted to be able to go outside like Charlotte Mason talked about and I wanted them to learn and appreciate art and music. So I had to find curriculum that did just that and I think I did a pretty good job. Considering that I wanted to take this from a philosophical point of view and I also wanted to make sure that they learned about history so that they would not be doomed to repeat it or associate themselves with groups factions or political ideals or what have you that would lead to the redoing of bad decisions I guess I can't think of a better way to phrase that I decided to go with DK books because while I was going through the well trained minds history curriculum story of the world I liked how they broke it down into bite-sized pieces I liked how it was story based but I also want to be able to have references and I wanted good as non-biased historical information that's possible and considering that it's kind of hard to find real good encyclopedias these days DK publishing is the best I could find at the time. So between story of the world and Geo matters for geography and DK publishing history books I had finally come up with my social studies arm with my social studies arm I would use my philosophy books that named places and people and I would tie that in we would do research on the person the place and what actually took place. Now in the story of the world they do have their geography maps but they were kind of awkward I didn't really like them which is why I chose Geo matters because it has its own maps and things that I kind of like better and it was secular. I often tell people to go to rainbow resources because that's how I found Geo matters it's not as popular as most people think and it has your elementary level as well as your middle-aged group level that is excellent it's actually good it has coloring pages and things like that that are great for younger children and it also has questions and the like for your older kids. So for somebody like me who has a 14-year-old now and 11 year old and a 5 year old I can still use those same pages that I used initially moving forward because repetition is key even though you learn the same thing over and over again as you get older you discover new things that you didn't discover the first time around. And as my older kids are learning the old history now they can find parallels between current events and the past. When you don't study the past it makes it easier to repeat gross offenses that took place in the past.
When I came to the realization that I needed to start with the end in mind I had seen a curriculum map on the well-trained mine website as well as classical academic press as they were rolling out there curriculum and I created one for my own family using all of the curriculum items that I was going to use for my children. When I was going to use them how long I was going to use them I didn't put all of the pages and stuff in there because I hadn't gotten that far yet but I basically made an entire curriculum map from kindergarten on to high school and we have been on track ever since. I was trying to add it in a picture here but I can't find it and I don't know which drive it then I thought I had migrated all of my homeschool stuff to this email account but I guess I didn't so I need to go back and do that. In the meantime I'll just leave this as it is and I'll probably add it in another blog post later as soon as I find it. But I definitely wanted to add it for people that subscribe to get it as a free pdf so they can start thinking about how to add or create their own curriculum maps for their homeschools.
what is private school style home education?
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