Monday, August 30, 2010

Ambleside Selections for 2010-2011

Ambleside Selection 2010-2011


TERM 1 (August- October)


 Ludwig von Beethoven (1810) (Classical/Romantic)
    Listening selections for this term:
    Piano Sonata 8 (Pathetique) Opus 13
    Piano Sonata 14 (Moonlight) Op 27
    Symphony No. 3 (Erocia-meaning 'heroic') Opus 55
    String Quartets opus 59, no.1-3 (Razumovsky Quartets)
    Piano Concerto 5 (Emporer) Op 73
    Symphony No. 9 (the one with Ode to Joy at the end) Opus 125


Claude Monet (1840-1926) French Impressionist (Biography or here)
   1. Terrace at St. Adresse, 1866, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
   2. Women in the Garden, 1866, Musee d'Orsay, Paris
   3. Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse, 1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
   4. Woman with a Parasol: Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (see slso here)
   5. Tulip Fields in Holland, 1886, Musee d'Orsay, Paris
   6. The Waterlily Pond, 1899, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (more here)


Shakespeare: Finish Coriolanus.
Plutarch: Finish Coriolanus


TERM 2 (November-February)

Antonio Vivaldi (1730) (Baroque)
Listening selections for this term:
    Gloria (choral work);
    The Four Seasons;
    Trio Sonata in C major, RV.82;
    plus 3 concerti - Maybe one for violin, one for guitar and
    one for a woodwind instrument such as oboe or bassoon.


Albrecht Durer (1471-1528)

Shakespeare: The Tempest
Plutarch: Cato the Censor


TERM 3 (March-May)




Frederic Chopin (1840) (Romantic)
Listening selections for this term:
    Op 09 no 2 Nocturne in E flat maj
    Op 10 no 3 Etude in E-maj
    Op 10 no 12 Revolutionary Etude in C minor
    Op 21 Piano Concerto number 2 in f minor
    Op 28 Preludes no's 15, 20 and either 16 or 17
    Op 53 Polonaise in A flat, Heroic


John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) American (Biography)
   1. Oyster Gatherers of Cancale, 1878, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC
   2. The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
   3. (Violet Sargent at) The Breakfast Table, 1884, Fogg Museum of Art (Harvard, Cambridge, MA). Violet was Sargent's younger sister; he himself never married or had children.
   4. Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885-6, Tate Gallery, London, England (see also here")
   5. An Artist in his Studio, 1904, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
   6. Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892-3, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
      Singer Sargent also painted Theodore Roosevelt, 1903, The White House, Washington, D.C.
      and Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife, 1885, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK

Shakepeare:  Hamlet
Plutarch: Romulus

Friday, February 26, 2010

Morning Time: March 2010

                      MORNING TIME PLANS FOR :
                         Week 1 March 2010


Ambleside Selections: 


Artist:

Raphael

                                         The School of Athens







Composer:
Grieg (Peer Gynt’s Suite)


Folk Song:
 (We are completely behind on these this year.)

The Old Oaken Bucket


The Jam on Gerry’s Rock

Shakespeare:

Coriolanus

Plutarch:

Coriolanus

Grammar Time:

Mother Tongue II



Bible Time:

Prayer Requests


NT: Read and discuss Matthew

Review:

Books of the NT
Books of the OT
Deuteronomy  6:4-9
Matthew 6:19-34
Deuteronomy 28:1-17


Read Aloud from Worldliness edited by CJ Mahaney

Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World


Hymn Singing:
New:
Jesus’ Name
 (I am not related to these children in anyway but they do sound better tahn we do.)

Review:

Fairest Lord Jesus

Faithful Men Twila Paris

Oh, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing

Glorious is Thy Name

God Leads Us Along

Poetry: 

Read and discuss one poem from 101 Famous Poems


New:
Breathes by Walter Scott

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.


Review:

St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V:



I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General:





Horatius at the Bridge 
 ( This is the first part of the poem, it may help with pronunciation although I am not convinced the guys pronunciation is right.)  This poem is often taught abridged. Guess what? Why not just go for the whole thing??

The Second Coming Yeats:




Where the Boats Go RLS


DARK brown is the river.
  Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
  With trees on either hand.
  
Green leaves a-floating,        
  Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating—
  Where will all come home?
  
On goes the river
  And out past the mill, 
Away down the valley,
  Away down the hill.
  
Away down the river,
  A hundred miles or more,
Other little children 
  Shall bring my boats ashore



Misc. Memory:
Presidents Bee
Bill of Rights 4
Bill of Rights 5
Bill of Rights 6
Bill of Rights 7


Reading Aloud: 

The Silver Chair

The Silver Chair (Narnia)

America Grows Up

The Light Beyond the Forest

The Light beyond the Forest: The Quest for the Holy Grail (Arthurian Trilogy, Vol 2)

Using MT to Promote Discussion

Yesterday, very late, 10:45, I finally called everyone together for MT. We began with prayer concentrating on Nathaniel who is apprenticing in a nuclear plant this month.

Because Christopher, my senior, needs to get the show on the road, I decided to go straight to grammar after prayer.  I pulled out my vintage Mother Tongue II and we discussed transitive and intransitive verbs. We orally analyzed several sentences together and then individually.  Then I let Christopher leave to finish up That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis.

One of the reasons I skipped several items during the morning is that I had been away last week, and I just wanted to reassert things slowly. Therefore, we did not sing. We sound terrible, so it is always a temptation not to sing but I am determined that we WILL sing on most days. Today we will sing 2 songs. Yesterday's Coram Deo by Judy Rogers and today's Crown Him with Many Crowns.

Then I read EX 20:1-17 as our review passage.  Plenty of fodder for the mill in that. We first discussed the idea of taking God's name in vain and how God will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. We also discussed covetousness.

 Then we headed over to review and relearn Gen 1:1-5.
Which reminded me of my Morning and Evening devotional so I pulled that out and read it.  It was based on the verse Ezekial 34:26  "I will cause the shower to come down in his season: there shall be showers of blessing."  I used this as a socratic jumping off spot and we defined the terms in the verse. Everyone participating. We defined Cause, Season, Showers and Blessings.  In the end we concluded that since we are not God and cannot control the weather, it was a sin to complain about the weather but maybe not a sin to be disappointed in the weather. My real goal was to stop the baseball players in the family from being dramatic weather watchers for the next few months. Weather can wreck havoc on a baseball season and I just wanted to establish where it came from. By the way, Christopher was not far off reading and he participated in this discussion.

We then went on to read Worldliness edited by CJ Mahaney. We are on the end chapters on modesty so it is more pointed at Emily. Not too fun for her, so I make sure that I make connections to masculine modesty also.

I am continuing to read through 101 Famous Poems with the children. We discuss one poem a day and the poem we discussed yesterday was:


Abraham Lincoln Walks at Night (In Springfield, Illinois)  by Vachel Lindsay

We are not huge Lincoln fans here so I wasn't sure how the poem would go over but it turned out to be an excellent poem in which to discuss modernity which is the time period my high school students are studying. 

We concentrated on these three verses from the perspective of the time period the poem was written in which was 1914. Significant. We discussed Lincoln, the Civil War, the beginnings of WWI,  The League of Nations and mostly all that was meant by :The Workers' Earth. We discussed 'The little man" the "working man" etc. We discussed socialism at great length noting that we know more about it now than they did in 1914. We were able to bring most of this discussion down to a simple concept that Alex could understand. We ended our discussion on the topic of self-government.

The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.
He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main.
He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now
The bitterness, the folly and the pain. 
He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn
Shall come:--the shining hope of Europe free:
The league of sober folk, the Workers' Earth,
Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea. 
It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,
That all his hours of travail here for men
Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace
That he may sleep upon his hill again?    

At this point the remaining High-schoolers were dismissed, after I decided that we would not read Coriolanus in either Shakespeare or Plutarch during the morning.

Alex and Andrew and I continued reviewing All the World's a Stage and I had Alex act out the 7 seasons as we read. He balked at sighing like a lover.

We also reviewed Breathes by Walter Scott which we are relearning.

I reviewed the US Oath of Citizenship which they mostly know and told them to write it out for their narration for 2 days and then Friday I would test them on it by having them write it from memory.

We reviewed the 1st Amendment and discussed the 5 rights guaranteed by it.  We also discussed the Constitution and what the Bill of Rights actually were. This came in handy as while we were reading aloud America Grows Up we learned about the 1st Continental Congress. We decided that it would be fun to visit Mount Vernon on our trip to Washington this summer.

We then went on to read aloud The Light Beyond the Forest which details the search for the Holy Grail.

The Light beyond the Forest: The Quest for the Holy Grail (Arthurian Trilogy, Vol 2)


America Grows Up which I already mentioned and:

The Silver Chair (Narnia)  by CS Lewis

I hope you can see the richness of having these sorts of discussions every single day. The thing I absolutely love about it is that the younger students are being stretched while the older students are learning. I let all participate equally and of course, I draw out those who are quiet. We do laugh a lot and our family can be a bit brutal sometimes. We all love to hear what Alex, the youngest, has to say before any concept is defined. Andrew seems to have a better grasp of grammar than my high school students but then again he has had 3 years of Latin at a younger age. I say 3 years of  Latin for Children but we only get through 2/3 of a book a year.

The one other beauty of this method is that it helps children learn how to make connections which is the heart of intuition.

As you can see, I did not let the schedule dictate the time. I dropped things off in order to fully grasp the moments that arose naturally.  Finding this balance is often difficult. If you are the type that must get through the LIST then teach yourself to embrace the moments of discussion that arise. Don't ever rush those until they deteriorate into frivolity which they inevitably do.  That is some part of the art of teaching, I think.