Picturing the Past- A wonderful Charlotte Mason inspired Artist Study Resource

As I tread on in my (very fledgling) homeschool journey, I am continuously in awe at both the great weight and the immense joy it is to be the Curator and Instructor for my boy's' education. There is truly so much that I want them to know and even more than that, so many beautiful things I want them to be able to experience and take pleasure in. I secretly have always purposed to raise little Renaissance Men- I really hope for my boys to be able to have a wide appreciation for the vast amounts of Goodness, Truth and Beauty  that are found, literally, everywhere. There are so many pursuits and pastimes that been dismissed by our generation as antiquated and particularly not "manly". This is depressing considering that most of the geniuses in the creative fields for years have been men and being "cultured" has traditionally been a sign of an accomplished man. Honestly, my boys live on a farm and are surrounded by very amazing, hard working, masculine men and I really couldn't be more grateful for that! They learn so much from these grounded and wise men, but the "cultured" part is up to their Mama! ;) And since I am on a vulnerable streak here, I'll also add that I am not always very reliable at providing them the opportunities to be exposed to the Arts and other sources of enrichment. They are a rough and tumble bunch who are always chomping at the bit to get to some "war game" or head out the door. Many days between (what feels like constantly) feeding them, cleaning up after all the "fun" they've had and trying to fit in a few quiet moments for myself, it seems that we are lucky to get the very basics of school in each day. All the amazing and beautiful "extras" I so wish to have woven thru our days usually get left in "a dream" status. 

Though I have found a very effective way to add enrichment subjects to our days is Morning Time- an hour or so each morning that we tackle little bites of various topics such as catechism, poetry, etc.-I am really striving to add Artist and Composer study to this Feast on a more regular basis. This is an area that I don't have a lot of natural resources and storehouses to access in my own accord. I have book lists galore archived in my head but paintings and pieces of classical music- not so much. I grew up doing a lot of reading, especially since I have a natural affinity for it, but I didn't have a lot of attraction or exposure to artists and composers. So this is really a whole new game for both my boys and I. I'm really okay with that though, because one of my favorite benefits of homeschooling is that I get to learn right beside my kids. There is always something new to discover in this life!

 I decided to just jump in and do something for an artist study, even if I didn't have a ton of personal knowledge to impart or the perfect approach to use. In all honesty, we have studied one artist this year. Not exactly impressive, but we have fit in a lot of fun coordinating projects and books because we weren't on a tight time frame. My boys are really young and we have many years left to fill with new artists and their paintings. We choose Van Gogh this fall, partly because we had an abundance of sunflowers blooming and Vanf Gogh's sunflower paintings seemed like a perfect fit to introduce art study. We of course looked at a couple of his renditions of his favorite flower and the style in which he painted. We made some of our own sunflower masterpieces, which the boys really enjoyed. I found a couple of picture books about Van Gogh and his life and those fit in really nicely with our study. 

I was really excited to find out that the met museum has an extensive collection of classic art pieces archived online for free personal download and use. I printed out 4x6s of a few of our favorite Van Gogh pieces and have them displayed on our "school wall." But nothing beats having art in larger format, high quality prints to study. A wonderful resource I have found for providing a wide collection of famous artists pictures in one book and also a neat format for documenting your students artist study is Sarah Brown's Picturing the Past: Charlotte Mason Homeschooling Study of Art and History. In true Funschooling fashion, this is a large format, high quality (and thick!) workbook. It is designed to be a year long study that covers 15 well known artists-as well as a fun collection of pictures by unknown artists at the end- that are dated from 1700-1930. The Artists included are Pierre Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassett, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Charles Burton Barber, Harry Brooker, Albert Anker, George Dunlop Leslie, Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Camille Pissarro, John William Waterhouse, Grant Wood, and Lois Wain. Each artist has an average of five pictures featured and a dedicated work page accompanying each picture for recording impressions and notes from the student. The worksheet asks students to look at the piece of art for a few minutes and then answer two of the four questions on a given day. The questions are "What can you learn from this picture?", "What do you think the artist is trying to communicate?", "Make up a short story about this picture:", and "How does this picture make you feel?" I think these questions tie into the Charlotte Mason method of artist study pretty neatly. Mason advocated a pretty simple, straight forward approach of repeatedly showing an art print to a student over a period of time and asking them to observe the painting and remember what details they could to tell back. These repetitive, open ended questions will give the child a idea of what to be "looking" for in the painting and what will be expected of him later on in the study time.

My boys are all technically under the recommended age range for this workbook, but they caught on to the concept pretty quickly. I plan to stretch this study book well over the year long period it is designed for and use it as an awesome art study supplement to record the artists we've studied over our school career. 

We finished out our study of Van Gogh by "celebrating" his birthday on March 30th! The boys had fun filling out a interactive, little booklet about Van Gogh's approach to painting and some of his most famous pieces. My oldest received a high quality, paint by number of "The Starry Night" and enjoyed working on that. My Preschooler is super creative and did a great job on making his own rendition of "The Starry Night" with paints and construction paper!

Artist study has been a grand, new adventure for our little schoolroom and I am so thankful to have the Picturing the Past: picture study journal to provide me with some direction and actual prints to use. I think we'll dive into Monet next!

I am very grateful to The Thinking Tree LLC. for providing me with this great resource for my family and to be able to share a thorough review with you all.

The Fun Way to School: Thinking Tree's Fun-Schooling Journals

The Holidays have came and gone and it's now time to find a new rhythm and inspiration for the cold and sometimes dreary Winter months ahead. A couple motivating factors are lingering from the Christmas celebrating- A new electric pressure cooker (Christmas gift from the husband!) to inspire flavorful, yet much quicker dishes in the kitchen and a much deal of a boost, the news that our sweet baby #4 is on the way in early August! What a precious gift this revelation was to receive this Christmas; all of my boys are very excited for a new member of the family and the countdown to baby will definitely help pass the Winter months with anticipation. Though it also means that Mama's energy levels have plummeted pretty impressively during the tricky first trimester and things around our house have had to be slightly adjusted for the time being. The chores mostly get done, though not quite so efficiently. Meals are getting on the table one way or another, a big thanks to my generous husband who has been known to be bringing home a lot more take out after work. School is an important and fun part of our day that I really don't want to completely drop the ball on this front. I wanted lie to you, our full line up of school doesn't happen every day- I will add though that my "ideal" school schedule I set up in the fall is pretty ambitious so it takes a really good day to get to all of it! I am very ok with currently cutting back to the necessities and a few fun extras to keep school a joy and not a burden. We still fit in Morning time on the days that I'm feeling energetic and on the not quite days we aim for reading, handwriting, math and some supplemental fun activity. One of our favorite Fun Schooling resources has been the Thinking Tree Fun-Schooling Journals. There is such an impressive range of options offered- for all different ages, boys or girls, season specific and more. We own the Ages 3 to 7 Fun-Schooling Journal - Do-It-Yourself Homeschooling for Beginners: Homeschool Prep-Book For New Readers and Non-Readers!  and the Ages 6-9 Fun-Schooling Journal - Do-It-Yourself Homeschooling 1st - 3rd Grade: Learning Activities For New & Struggling Readers. 

My boys love having their own special books and I really like how open ended they are. Unlike usual school work books that are looking for specific answers, these books really are more like a personal learning journal that kids can really make their own. There are prompts and activities on each page such as a page for nature study documenting, plenty of coloring opportunities, pages for recording books read and copy work, and much more!

 Since my little boy using the Ages 3-7 book is on the younger side of the age range there is a decent amount of writing space that he will dictate for me or he'll grow into later, but there is still plenty of coloring and drawing activities to keep him busy!

We have slowly been working our way thru the Beautiful Feet books Early American History Primary Study and came up to an activity where we were to write out The Principle of Individuality and stamp the boys finger prints around the copy work. I felt this would be the perfect type of activity to archive in our school journals. My littler boy went crazy with finger print art all over the poem I wrote out for him. The artwork on the page we chose includes numerous cats hidden through out and he just loves cats, so I had him search for and circle all the cats he could find. 

My oldest kept things a bit tidier with a neat circle of finger prints surrounding the poem and then he played "look and find" with the music notes in the surrounding picture. 

He also had fun filling out one of the Thinking Time pages that asked him to complete lines of patterns- a great exercise in logic skills.

These books have been a life saver for this currently low energy Mama, providing me with a pretty much self directed learning resource that I can easily get away offering to my boys as "pure fun". I think it will also be a neat way to store,"notebooking" style, different school activities that don't naturally fit into another school book. I am excited for the many other options of Fun Schooling journals we will have to look forward to in the years to come!

Thank you to Thinking Tree Publishing LLC for providing these books for me review and share with my readers.

  

Making Math Fun!

Math has never been my "thing". It was my least favorite subject in school and I barely made it thru Algebra. I love letters, words and stories; numbers, letters and equations- not so much. I do realize the great importance of math and honestly, I wish I would have kept my mental math more up to par and not just delegated that skill to my smart phone. Always something to work towards, I suppose! But, my little boys love math and have so naturally caught on to it. They find math problems everywhere in every day life and take great pride in their budding skills. I am sure my oldest would do just fine if I set a run of the mill math text book in front of him with just basic math equations to solve. However, there are so many wonderful and fun out of the box math books and teaching ideas out there for his age I just can't quite bring myself to do it! 

We have been using a mixture of Miquon Math Orange Book and Kate Snow's Addition Facts that Stick as our main math curriculum. But we've also been using a fun math supplement that I mainly wanted to share with you today! 100 Numbers Wildlife Coloring Book by Sarah Janisse Brown of Thinking Tree Books is a fabulous workbook that focuses on teaching the 100 chart. The 100 chart concept is such a great tool to get kids acquainted with the first 100 numbers and what they look like in succession. You can use it as a number line, to look for patterns, and to skip count by twos, fives, tens, etc. A book I picked up this fall on teaching math in homeschool-Let's Play Math by Denise Gaskins, has a whole section on different activities and games you can use a 100 chart to do. We jumped into our 100 Numbers book and tried out a few.

First, I had Cole take some counter stones and count by 5's and mark it off with the stones.

Then we marked only the numbers with 7's in them and found a neat design.

Another neat, creative activity we did was find and color in which numbers would "make" a heart. 

The book itself offers multiple activities- a new "way" to count to 100 each time! Some examples are color all numbers with twos, write all your favorite numbers, color all the even numbers, and many more.

 Each math page has a corresponding fun animal coloring page. They vary from realistic black and white animal photos to detailed, adult coloring book style pictures to color in. Some pages even come with lines to write a short description or story about the featured animal.

I am sure this is a book we will have no problem filling up with colorful fun and numbers by the end of the year!

Thanks to Thinking Tree Books for providing this wonderful book for me to review and share with you all. 

DIY History "Textbook"- Make Your Own Timeline of World History

Fall keeps marching on and here on the Oregon Coast that means less days of little boys playing out in the sunshine and more rainy days in the house with Mama- I have an affinity for both kinds of days. Today we fell back in day light savings time which looks like it being dark by 5 pm. This is the season for Gathering- gathering together my boys in our cozy home while the rains come down outside. Gathering stories to fill little imaginations with new adventures and heroes to "be" when a clear day comes along. Some of the very best kind of stories I want to share with my boys are the truest ones- History. More and more, I am being convicted that giving a comprehensive and correct view of what has happened in the world before our time and place in it, is one of the most noble goals in an education. I want my boys to see and know both the gravity and the hope of our place in time and history. That there truly is nothing new under the sun and to learn from the mistakes and the victories of those who have gone before us. I want to know these things- I need to know these things.

 While I was fortunate to have an advantage being educated

 with christian history text books, I still don't feel that remembering the bold type names and dates in the book just long enough to take a test really gave me a true picture or love for History. I am really enamored with the idea of introducing history to my boys through living books and am so thankful for the multitude of pre-organized history "spines" to provide a conclusive time frame and book list to delve into. So far, I have used a mixture of Sonlight's Core A- Introduction to the World and Beautiful Feet Books- Early American History. There are two main schools of thought on how to introduce history and the world to children: the first is to start with national history (since that is in a big sense, their "world") and the second is to begin with a brief scope of global reach. I have had a very hard time committing to either philosophy exclusively. I love the idea and have really enjoyed presenting glimpses of other cultures and peoples to my boys but there are also so many amazing books and heroes from our own national history for kids. So, I have done both! Sometimes, I get a little scared that it is too broad and not focused enough of an approach for them to get a clear understanding of any type of a timeline in it all. But I am holding on to the hope of Charlotte Mason's teaching to just set out a broad feast of truth and that the child will make the connections they need to in due time. 

 One very helpful way to keep all of this new found knowledge in line is a history timeline. This is no new idea and there are plenty of versions, both pre-made and bought or DIY and free. I know this is an idea I want to implement on an individual level when my boys are older students. I think it will be very neat for each of them to have their own "version" of world history- a catalog of prominent events and things that stood out to them the most thru their education. I know they are too young to take this project on right now, right now it would be mom doing all the work for them! But I also am aware that we are learning so much great history right now,while they are small, that I want to have a record of. In comes another amazing resource from Thinking Tree Books, Make Your Own Timeline of World History. When I talked with Sarah Janisse Brown, the creator of Thinking Tree Books, about the books she would recommend I try out with my boys this year, I mentioned to her that I was really interested in doing a history timeline but felt it would be a little presumptuous to start with my boys being so young. Sarah was so encouraging in her advice- She reminded me that kids learn best when Mama is learning right alongside of them. She suggested that I go ahead and start a timeline for all of us currently and I am so glad I took her advice! It has been a lot of fun already to not only learn about some amazing individuals and their contributions to World History, but also be able to peg them to a certain period. From there, it is pretty neat to have a evolving grid to hold new discoveries and dates up to and see how everything fits together!

The book itself is a joy to use- It has a vibrantly designed cover with a lush, matte finish. It is impressively thick at 365 pages- plenty of room for recording a whole lot of history! There is a straight forward and simple to use page format of A box for your time period date, a space for drawing or pictures and a lined box for journaling. I'll admit, at first I was a little intimidated by how open ended the format of this book is. It is truly designed to be customized to whatever your family needs it to be! I looked around the internet a bit and did some brainstorming and decided to break the book up into 26 equally portioned time frames. I used page flags to mark off the different time eras and make them quickly accessible. 

Lately, we have been learning about Vikings- particularly reading thru Leif the Lucky and learning about the earliest discovery of North America. My oldest has been loving reading one of these delightful classics from the D'Aulaires! we also use the Usborne Children's Encyclopedia and Living Long Ago quite a lot after being introduced to them by Sonlight. I found a fun viking paper doll printable that my oldest colored. We cut it out and put in our Vikings time period pages and have enjoyed adding information about Leif the explorer as we go!

I am so glad to have come across the idea and started to implement a history timeline so early in my boys' schooling journey. What a treasure it will be to have our ventures thru history mapped out for us in this delightful book. That will be something this Mama will consider a family heirloom! ;) 

 I received this book from the Thinking Tree LLC.

Plan and Document your Homeschool (and have fun while doing it!)

We have (Finally!) got a rhythm and a plan going for our school year that works for us and that we are actually getting done on a consistent basis- rather than just theoretically thinking will work. I have a daily minimum Three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) that Cole needs to get down and more than enough extras to plug in when we can. There are so many things I want to do and learn with my boys but I have definitely found just because I have the idea and desire doesn't mean it's going to happen. I need a plan and I'm also finding, I need a planner. I have always loved the idea of physical, write in planners but have never really found them realistic enough to need on a regular basis for my day to day life. So much of my daily life is just routine chores and tasks, there's really no reason to have them written down in a book, no matter how cute it is (believe me, I've tried to justify it many times to myself!). But I am finding that school plans are so much more likely to be executed if I have thought and written them out in advance, rather than waiting for an idea to pop into my head and then having to go gather up all the supplies, etc. 

But then it comes down to which planner to use, because there are about 100 just homeschooling planners alone. Well Sarah Janisse Brown of Thinking Tree Books was so generous to send me a copy of her planner, The Eclectic Homeschooler's Plan Book-A 180 Day Plan to give a try out in my homeschool planning endeavors.

 I love how open ended all of the Thinking Tree products are- you can really customize them to exactly what your family needs to get out of them! The cover alone is a motivating start with it's bright and engaging hand drawn pictures and a soft to the touch matte finish. This is a thick book with a nice, large format to fit a lot of plans into. With the signature Thinking Tree flair, these aren't just ordinary black and white pages, but all of your planning boxes are set against a fun floral and swirls pattern to color in. 

I think when homeschooling older and a little bit more independent learners, this book would be a great for fit for the daily spiral notebook assignment checklist method Sarah Mackenzie encourages in this post. This is really a funner and slightly more detailed version of just that idea. I think I am personally going to be using this planner slightly more out of the box while my kids are younger and document weekly projects, achievements and just fun moments I want to remember from our schooling journey. I think it will be really neat to have a written record of all the highlights of our early learning years! 

There is also a neat bonus feature sprinkled through out the book: There is a Plans & Perspective page to journal a little more long term goals and visions and a correlating Remember... page to document stand out school experiences. This is a well made, beautiful book that is straight forward enough in it's format that I think you could use it in a multitude of ways.

I am loving our experience with Thinking Tree books so far and can't wait to share some more of these treasures with you. Being a Charlotte Mason inspired Mama, I am especially excited to dive into the Timeline of History and Picturing the Past art study books. 

I received this book from The Thinking Tree LLC.

Saying goodbye to Summer and hello to Fun Schooling

The leaves are starting to fall, the evenings have got a chill to them and there's more garden harvest than I know what to do with; I think it's safe to say that fall is upon us. It's a bittersweet fact around this house: we are summer lovin' folks. The season of the sun is fairly short lived in the Pacific Northwest and as much as we don't mind the rain, the sunshine is a gift we hold onto as long as we can. Autumn is slowly winning us over though. With it's mountains of apples, beautiful landscape and piles of fresh books and a new year of school to dive into! 

September was a semi-summer holdover month for us with lots of end of the season trips and plans and so much garden preserving to get done. I think October will be our official buckle down into a structured school pattern month. We have dipped our toes into the academic year and it's been an encouraging intro to the school year. I did put some semblance actual goal setting and lesson planning together in August and I think that's going to be a blessing in the coming weeks! For now, we've jumped into some seasonal and interest led projects- such as apple sauce making and apple sauce inspired poetry writing, constructing "measure for measure" paper skeletons of the boys and of course, a lot of fall nature study. We are warming our way back into Morning Time and Asher is excited to be an "official" preschooler this year. Cole and I picked back up in the "100 easy lessons" reading book were we left off at the end of last year and we are both really encouraged by how much more competent he is with reading now! He's started to pine over being able to just being able to pick up a book and read it. I think his actually really wanting to read and pride in what he's learned so far is really going to take him a long ways this year! 

Another new dimension I'm really excited to add to our school plans this year is not only educational, but also just plain fun! we are going to enjoy some Fun Schooling with Thinking Tree books. I have had my eye on this super creative and open ended series of interactive books for quite some time now (complete with having a pretty full Amazon wishlist of the titles I wanted to try out most on standby ;). Sarah Janisse Brown is a homeschooling Mama of a large brood who has authored and illustrated so many titles in this ever growing and unique collection of homeschool books. They fit nicely into "out of the box" unschooling and as a Charlotte Mason-esque supplement, as I intend to use them.  Sarah was very generous and sent me a hefty box of personally curated books for my boys and I to enjoy and share with all of you. I can't wait to get these bright and engaging books into my boys hands and share in depth looks into new titles with you through out the school year. I really think my boys are going to learn so much copying things into their very own fun schooling journals and I'm going to look for excuses to "learn" things to jot down in my own homeschooling handbook ;) (spoiler alert!) I foresee these books doing a wonderful job of keeping the joy in learning under the guise of just being "for fun"!

The first book I want to share with you is the perfect example of how focused Sarah is in these titles on capturing the interest and heart of a child. The All about Horses Homeschooling Journal is a thick and delightful six week unit study on, you guessed it, Horses! The first page asks students to write down several things they want to specifically learn thru their study time about horses and then instructs them to go to the local library and pick up six books to use as "text books". The book may be all in black and white but it does not lack in beautifully detailed illustrations and all the more opportunity for kids to get creative themselves in coloring it in! 

Each day's study opens with a fun circle the date intro page and place to fill in a daily to do list and daily inspiration. After that, Sarah does a fantastic job of mixing things up each day and including a wide variety of activities and "subjects". One day the student is learning to draw a horse, finding spelling words in their horse "text books" and another they are watching a documentary, writing up a days worth of meal plans and doing a nature study sketch. I just think this is a really great way to engage a maybe hesitant student who would rather be out, say, riding a horse than working in school books.There is an impressive mixture of inspiring, yet open ended project prompts to definitely document education but the learning itself is coming from such pleasurable, real life experiences. 

I would have LOVED this book as a homeschooled farm girl growing up and I have a little animal lover middle child who I think will grow into this fun resource nicely. :)

I received these products in exchange for my honest review.