Summer school...

We all start looking forward to the summer months and "having a break from school" by the time April and May rolls around. Well here it is June and I am about ready to experiment with a few ideas for summer projects that are fun and different from what we do year round. I want to do a few unit studies with the girls that interest me as well, hopefully opening up our minds a bit. (It's my way of actually "doing school" without the girls knowing that this is all part of the yearly school plan!) I was going through the Veritas Press catalog recently and decided that it would be great to do a music study and maybe an art study. I took a few classes in my community college years relating to these subjects, only because they were required general ed courses, and I do remember bits and pieces. The Veritas Press catalog suggests the Classical Kids series for music. They are a series of CDs featuring music, history and storytelling to teach about famous composers. Our local library has many of the CDs suggested and so I went online to request several. I also found some simple biographies for children on the composers highlighted in the series so we can do a little extra reading. While online today I found a great site called Classics for Kids. There are worksheets that you can print out and short radio programs to listen to that are geared for kids on the lives of many of the great composers which of course incorporate some of their most well known music pieces. I enjoyed listening to a program on Vivaldi, which focused on Spring from his Four Seasons concerto. It was fun to listen to the different instruments and how they represented things such as birds, brooks and thunderstorms. It also gave the words to the poem Spring which the music is based on. By doing a music study I hope to introduce the girls to some different types of music, learn about famous composers and the time periods in which they lived, and also help them to recognize by sight and sound the different instruments of an orchestra. I am by no means an artsy or musically inclined person so this idea for a summer study will benefit me as well. It will sort of be like the blind leading the blind in some ways, I suppose, but that is what I love about homeschooling! Sometimes the parent learns as much as the child!