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Teaching Art/Music History


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Hello,

 

I am planning our new school year (year 2) and I am wondering how you structure you art/music history lessons.

Do you study an artist/composer per week, per month? Alternate Art and Music? Doing one a week seems heavy going and it feels like we are fitting in everything to year 2 and I wonder what we will do next year!!

 

Would love to hear your approaches!!

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I use Story of the World 1-4 (SOTW) and the SOTW Activity Book (SOTW AB) as my history spine.  SOTW 3 and 4 have major composers in them in the recommended reading section. I integrate Beethoven's Wig Sing Along Symphony series (I have all the CDs) and match up the composers. We read the recommended biographies (like those by Mike Venezia) and listen to the songs on the Beethoven's Wig CDs.  First we listen to the funny lyrics version of it and then the version that was originally written.  There are both on each CD. 
 

 

I have also added in this book and integrate it into my plans for painters:

http://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Great-Artists-Hands-On-Children/product-reviews/0935607099/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_2?ie=UTF8&pageNumber=2&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

 

If you look through the reviews with the newest ones first, you can scroll down a ways and read my review.  It's under my name, Lisa Munson Crews.  I detail the book, how I use it and how I integrate it in with history and my year's lesson plans. 

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I'm not very good at integrating music yet, but we have all the Music Masters. Sometimes I will find the kids have popped one in. DD#1 has them scheduled into her history lessons as it fits. She has no extra art study.

 

Once every week, we either read from the History of Art for Young People or play a game with our Art Cards, alternating between them. We're reading from the section of History of Art the time period we're studying in history, so they will recognize some people/events. Usually, some of us will end up on the computer looking at other works by the artists we've read about. We have another time each week when the kids work on drawing using Draw Write Now (ds#1 & ds#2), Draw & Write Through History (dd#2 or dd#3), or one of our drawing books (dd#2). These are during our 30 minute "enrichment" time which is daily. We rotate through geography, Sentence Family, art, or art. We're kind of an art family, I guess.

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Our history spine is actually an art book, Gardner's Art Through the Ages.  it hits all the history needed for middle years, but provides beautiful pictures of art/artifacts, gives lots of vocab/periods/timeline, and provides artists profiles as it goes.

 

Not quite there with music yet.

 

Oooh, tell me more!

 

 

How does a history lesson look?  Do you use other resources?

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Oooh, tell me more!

 

 

How does a history lesson look?  Do you use other resources?

 

I purchased Gardner's for my college art classes.  It is a giant, bludgeoning-device of a book and cost almost 100 dollars at the time.  When I went to buy back at the end of the year, they would only give me like thirty dollars for it.  Appalled, I vowed to keep the book for the rest of my life just to smite them.  This has proven infinitely helpful, though I doubt the CC is really feeling the pain of my decision.

 

Now you can purchase the book on Amazon (my old edition at least) for less than 10 dollars.  There have been nice little additional volumes featuring women and a few more places outside of Western Civ, but the need is really not there.  We went through India just last month and it was done quite well.  Still very few women, but I got the supplement for that.  Gardener was not a feminist, I'll put it that way.

 

Here is the book:  There are stacks of editions now that split into volumes, western/non western, backpack or concise editions.  Mine is just the giant whole deal since it is older and before all that.  As far as I can tell, not much is different with the different versions except more pieces to purchase and more women listed.  It is a long standing text with a well seated reputation (first published in 1926).  All color photographs and a timeline at the beginning of every chapter.  Largest selling English language art text in the world.

 

History Lesson

A history lesson basically involves me pulling out the massive book (1216 pages) and opening to the chapter we are studying.  They are separated into regional areas, so like Mesopotamia was a chapter.  India was a chapter.  Egypt, MesoAmerica, Greeks/Romans...you get the idea.  The chapters beginning pages have a timeline.  Ds and I look at the timeline and the little inset pictures that go with the events on the timeline.  Just general talking about the geography and interesting art stuff.  I then begin reading the chapter. He rarely reads from it personally, but enjoys listening.  Normally I read about 4 to 6 headings of information.  It is set up much like a magazine style with columns of writing under specific headings.  This helps me break it up so it does not become "wamp wamp wamp" as I read and Ds tunes out.  Their are pictures on almost every page.  So Ds frequently comes to look at the pages and talk with me about heirarchical scale, the Ishtar gate, where Iran is located, why BCE is so confusing, etc.  We read every other day.  I shoot to cover one region/area every six weeks.  We are doing ancients again this year so it was split into Mesopotamia - September/October, Indus River Valley - October/November, Egypt - November/December.  Greeks get to run from January till whenever Ds wants to stop.  He is rather obsessed with the whole Greek mythology thing so I am running with it.

 

You can look inside with Google Books Here.  You have to scroll through all the intro stuff till you get to the first chapter on page 15.  This version does not have the timeline like mine does.  The writing style, photographs and layout is all extremely similar though.

 

Monday, Wednesday, Friday we read Gardners.  Tuesday and Thrusday he gets to do multimedia supplement stuff.  We do the Veritas cards just about every day as a quick run through. 

 

Supplements

Khan Academy's Art History section is quite wonderful.  They often take video inside museums of the world, sometimes offer short quizzes to see how much is remembered, and have additional readings here and there if your student really wants to learn more about a specific thing.

 

Veritas Press History Cards have been great for just the nitty gritty dates, quick summary stuff.

 

Crash Course World History is fun and informative.  My son really likes them.  I have him fill out the Episode Guides so he has to listen to them more like three times to get all the fill in the blanks. It is just a sneaky way to have him rewatch since he gets more out of them every time.

 

We normally throw in one Great Course, but it is not necessary.  It is more just to listen to the lectures and talk about them since many are just so good.

 

Netflix documentaries have worked well here and there as well.

 

 

For Literature:

We combine literature in with Art/History/Theology stuff.  I am basically trying to do Omnibus without all the Christian centered focus.  YouTube has audiobook recordings of various Great Books and he listens to those.  Other books have proven harder to find and he reads many of them off the Omnibus Reading Lists.  We also fill it out with mythology of the various place, not just the Bible. For Egypt he did The Book of the Dead by Plutarch.  For Mesopotamia he did The Epic of Gilgamesh.  For Greeks he is going to do Odyssey (again), Iliad, and Aeneid.  We have been doing little sections of Herodotus' Histories here and there as it directly applies to the area we are studying.  All of these are available on YouTube for free in quite a nice quality audiobook.  Children's books from the library with great pictures have provided summarized versions if the full version is proving to be difficult for him.  He still listens, but the picture books often help if he is stumbling.  You could just as easily use the picture books by themselves if you have a younger student or one who is not so into ancient literature/mythology like my Ds.

 

Hopefully that answers your question.  If it didn't, just ask away and I will try to answer.

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I can't find any samples. Is this book intended for kids if for college kids? It's been on my wish list for a while.

 

It was on my wishlist for awhile, too. I picked it up from one of the used booksales when it was really cheap. I would say that you could use it for middle grades through high school. The pictures are mostly (all?) black and white, which is why we sometimes end up on the computer looking at color ones. The text is pretty dense, but we only read a page or two at a time (1-3 artists or architects). I sometimes combine a couple paragraphs with the free artist profiles that someone posted to this board within the last year.

 

My kids are usually working on drawing something while I'm reading, but they all look over for the pictures. My dd#2 is the most interested, but my two youngest boys comment on the play of light in the pictures or how one picture seems similar to another picture several pages back (when yes, the one we are looking at was influenced by another school of art from a couple pages back). They can't all name the movements or artists, but they'll have another go-through with them.

 

We had just finished Vermeer when one of my kids ran to find a book she'd read this summer because she recognized two of the pictures. Yep, "Chasing Vermeer." 

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  • 2 weeks later...

For art we do Artistic Pursuits and have been reading Ernest Raboff's "Art for Children" series. For music, I've found some biographies (one on Mozart, quite good; one on Bach, quite horrible, I have no idea who edited that book, but the mistakes in grammar, spelling, etc. were atrocious) on composers and since we read them once a week, it takes about a month to get through a book. So, we'll read a chapter or two and then I'll find a You-Tube video of an orchestra playing that composer and we'll watch that. We had a lot of fun with some of Mozart's operas. Didn't watch more than about 10 minutes of those, but the kids enjoyed them.

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I alternated between Art and Music each semester or year ie one semester (or sometimes year) for Art and then switched to Music. I used lots of different resources over that time - sometimes we did Music Appreciation, sometimes Music History. For Art we did Appreciation / History and hands on.

 

There is so much available that you won't run out. 

 

Here is a music curriculum that wasn't around when my kids where younger, but I would have used it if it were - http://www.squiltmusic.com/p/about_14.html

 

 

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Fabulous! Thanks for all of your replies, it is great to see so much variety. I think I have been too prescriptive in my plan and will relax these subjects a litte. Im a music teacher so we listen to and play lots of music and we do a lot of art naturally as well. I think I will just supplement this with books from the library and explore some of the links above for now and do more intensive studies in later years.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I purchased Gardner's for my college art classes.  It is a giant, bludgeoning-device of a book and cost almost 100 dollars at the time.  When I went to buy back at the end of the year, they would only give me like thirty dollars for it.  Appalled, I vowed to keep the book for the rest of my life just to smite them.  This has proven infinitely helpful, though I doubt the CC is really feeling the pain of my decision.

 

Now you can purchase the book on Amazon (my old edition at least) for less than 10 dollars.  There have been nice little additional volumes featuring women and a few more places outside of Western Civ, but the need is really not there.  We went through India just last month and it was done quite well.  Still very few women, but I got the supplement for that.  Gardener was not a feminist, I'll put it that way.

 

Here is the book:  There are stacks of editions now that split into volumes, western/non western, backpack or concise editions.  Mine is just the giant whole deal since it is older and before all that.  As far as I can tell, not much is different with the different versions except more pieces to purchase and more women listed.  It is a long standing text with a well seated reputation (first published in 1926).  All color photographs and a timeline at the beginning of every chapter.  Largest selling English language art text in the world.

 

History Lesson

A history lesson basically involves me pulling out the massive book (1216 pages) and opening to the chapter we are studying.  They are separated into regional areas, so like Mesopotamia was a chapter.  India was a chapter.  Egypt, MesoAmerica, Greeks/Romans...you get the idea.  The chapters beginning pages have a timeline.  Ds and I look at the timeline and the little inset pictures that go with the events on the timeline.  Just general talking about the geography and interesting art stuff.  I then begin reading the chapter. He rarely reads from it personally, but enjoys listening.  Normally I read about 4 to 6 headings of information.  It is set up much like a magazine style with columns of writing under specific headings.  This helps me break it up so it does not become "wamp wamp wamp" as I read and Ds tunes out.  Their are pictures on almost every page.  So Ds frequently comes to look at the pages and talk with me about heirarchical scale, the Ishtar gate, where Iran is located, why BCE is so confusing, etc.  We read every other day.  I shoot to cover one region/area every six weeks.  We are doing ancients again this year so it was split into Mesopotamia - September/October, Indus River Valley - October/November, Egypt - November/December.  Greeks get to run from January till whenever Ds wants to stop.  He is rather obsessed with the whole Greek mythology thing so I am running with it.

 

You can look inside with Google Books Here.  You have to scroll through all the intro stuff till you get to the first chapter on page 15.  This version does not have the timeline like mine does.  The writing style, photographs and layout is all extremely similar though.

 

Monday, Wednesday, Friday we read Gardners.  Tuesday and Thrusday he gets to do multimedia supplement stuff.  We do the Veritas cards just about every day as a quick run through. 

 

Supplements

Khan Academy's Art History section is quite wonderful.  They often take video inside museums of the world, sometimes offer short quizzes to see how much is remembered, and have additional readings here and there if your student really wants to learn more about a specific thing.

 

Veritas Press History Cards have been great for just the nitty gritty dates, quick summary stuff.

 

Crash Course World History is fun and informative.  My son really likes them.  I have him fill out the Episode Guides so he has to listen to them more like three times to get all the fill in the blanks. It is just a sneaky way to have him rewatch since he gets more out of them every time.

 

We normally throw in one Great Course, but it is not necessary.  It is more just to listen to the lectures and talk about them since many are just so good.

 

Netflix documentaries have worked well here and there as well.

 

 

For Literature:

We combine literature in with Art/History/Theology stuff.  I am basically trying to do Omnibus without all the Christian centered focus.  YouTube has audiobook recordings of various Great Books and he listens to those.  Other books have proven harder to find and he reads many of them off the Omnibus Reading Lists.  We also fill it out with mythology of the various place, not just the Bible. For Egypt he did The Book of the Dead by Plutarch.  For Mesopotamia he did The Epic of Gilgamesh.  For Greeks he is going to do Odyssey (again), Iliad, and Aeneid.  We have been doing little sections of Herodotus' Histories here and there as it directly applies to the area we are studying.  All of these are available on YouTube for free in quite a nice quality audiobook.  Children's books from the library with great pictures have provided summarized versions if the full version is proving to be difficult for him.  He still listens, but the picture books often help if he is stumbling.  You could just as easily use the picture books by themselves if you have a younger student or one who is not so into ancient literature/mythology like my Ds.

 

Hopefully that answers your question.  If it didn't, just ask away and I will try to answer.

 

 

Amazing!  Can I just send my kids to your house for history lessons?

 

 

 

...and now I'm digging in the basement for my old Music History books b/c I just may find your Garderner Art book and see how I can combine and tweak with music history.  We are finishing SOTW 4 this spring, and there are so.many.options, but I want something really WOW!!!  Your history lessons have the WOW-factor. :drool5:

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