The joy is returning!

Picture Study – Lori

Last week, Hannah Ruth mentioned in our first blog post that she loved picture study.  I think I’m falling in love too! Charlotte Mason said, “We cannot measure the influence that one or another artist has upon the child’s sense of beauty, upon his power of seeing, as in a picture, the common sights of life; he is enriched more than we know in having really looked at even a single picture” (Vol. 1, p. 309). Picture study is totally new to us this year.  Classical Conversations studies artists during the third six weeks of each Cycle.  We are in Cycle 1 and will be studying Giotto, Ghiberti, Fra Angelico, Dürer, Michelangelo, and El Greco the first of 2016. We decided on Dürer, for our first picture study this semester, since we will briefly see him again next semester. We purchased a picture study portfolio from Simply Charlotte Mason.

We are studying the art of Dürer one day each week.  We start by reading a little part of his biography. Then I hand the beautiful print to Hannah Ruth to study it for a few minutes. I do not give her any information about the picture; not even the title. After she studies it, I take the picture back and ask her to tell me what she remembers about the print. When Hannah Ruth narrates back to me what she saw in the picture, I am amazed at the detail. Her narration of the art helps me to study it in more depth than I would have on my own. She always sees so many beautiful fine points.

The picture is then placed somewhere in the house where we will see it often.  Each week we look at another picture by the artist and place it somewhere else. I believe picture study is improving her attention to detail as well as opening her eyes to the beauty of the great artists. My hope is that as we spend six to eight weeks really studying one artist, we may at some point be able to recognize his other works when at a museum or gallery or maybe in a book, simply because we have become so familiar with his style. We plan to study three artists this year.

Hannah Ruth discusses Nature Study – the Constellations

I liked doing the constellation cards. You can see them in the pictures below.  The way we did them is we took a pencil and drew dots copying off of a constellation in the book. (size depending on magnitude.)

After that we would take a pushpin and poke holes where the dots were. We then wrote the 1st and 2nd magnitude star’s names down. Then we wrote the name of the constellation under or above the constellation and you held it up to the light. We didn’t do this, but it is an optional part; you draw lines to connect the dots and shape the constellation. The constellations we did were Big Dog, the Ursa Major, the Twins, and the Virgin. It was really fun. The one thing I forgot to mention in the first post is that we started a nature journal! There is a picture of the constellation section. We haven’t been doing nature walks, but one night, we did stargaze. We will start nature walks this week. Nature study was fun.