The Martin Looper that gave the idea about studying other subjects with a Five in a Row approach suggested music study with this approach. We have read a lot about composers and listened to a lot of classical music in our homeschool. I decided this year to try the Five in a Row approach by focusing on one composer each month and listening to one piece of music from that composer for about a week.
In September we studied Bach. We have listened to and read about Bach before, but I wanted to review Bach with the Lambs and Bach is one of their favorites so they didn't complain. The review was good for them and they all learned new things about Bach that they didn't remember from reading about him a few years ago.
We read these books about Bach:
Sebastian Bach the Boy from Thuringia by Wheeler
(We also listened to all the music excerpts from this book on CD and Lamb 1 played some of the excerpts on the piano for us.)
Johann Sebastian Bach by Venzia
Sebastian a Book about Bach by Winter
Bach's Goldberg Variations by Celenza
First Discovery Music Bach-also listened to the CD with the book
Bach's Big Adventure by Ketcham
I would like to listen to some more of Bach's music either CDs that we own or from the Internet, but I am satisfied that the boys learned a lot about Bach in all the readings we did about him in September.
In October we studied Handel. We have not finished our study of Handel and we will not finish with all our fall activities planned. So we will continue to study Handel in November.
We read these books about Handel:
Handel at the Court of Kings by Wheeler
(Again we listened to all the music excerpts from this book on CD.)
Handel Who Knew What he Liked by Anderson
These were both books that we owned and I wasn't interested in other Handel biographies that our library owned. I think we will do more listening to Handel than reading about him. Both of these biographies that we did read were very informative.
Next I plan to study Haydn with the Lambs. With our schedule that may need to wait until after Christmas. We just plug along and fit composer study in when we can. The Opal Wheeler books about composers are interesting and we have all learned a lot about composers from them. I will try to make listening to this music a priority after Christmas and truly do the Five in a Row approach with it.
2 comments:
We're working on Beethoven so far this year, and I am so excited because I won tickets from our library for symphony tickets. We'll be taking the children to a performance that will be mostly Beethoven's music. Now, if the little ones will just cooperate so we don't have to take them out. . .
If you're looking for a good overview book, my students (all ages) love the book "The Lives of the Musicians: the Good, the Bad and what the Neighbors Thought." Entertaining with lots of unusual facts. And of course, I use the Beethoven Wig cds (from my library) to help my kids remember specific composers and songs.
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