We've met it with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. No one in this house willingly abandons the joys of summertime for nine months of servitude to books. OK, I have to qualify that. We love books in this house--as long as they're books that we read by our OWN choosing, not the choosing of someone else.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a fairly loose schooler, leaning MUCH more toward the unschool approach than when we first started this homeschool adventure 8 years ago.
This morning we started with a Jump-Start With Art program by introducing to my daughter just what we would be doing. And you know what? By the end of it, and by the end of a little stop-animation project we did, she was ready and eager to jump into some other subjects.
First, we looked at our blog. I explained to her that I'd be posting daily on our blog about what we'd done that day, AND taking pictures. She wasn't QUITE so excited about that last prospect.
We then talked about the definition of art.
So, I ask you: What is art?
I liked this series of definitions from Dictionary.com that were most useful for our purposes:
1. a. the creation of works of beauty or other special significance
b. ( as modifier ): an art movement
2. the exercise of human skill (as distinguished from nature )
3. imaginative skill as applied to representations of the natural world or figments of the imagination
4. a. the products of man's creative activities; works of art collectively, esp of the visual arts, sometimes also music, drama, dance, and literature
These definitions emphasize creation, skill, imagination, activity, and production. All excellent words when we're talking about the purpose of JSWA.
We then detailed the different areas of art and looked at or talked about some examples. Those areas are:
1. Visual arts:
i. Drawing and Painting
ii. Sculpture
iii. Photography
iv. Design
v. Crafts
vi. Architecture
vii. Textile Arts
2. Performance Arts
i. Music
ii. Dance
iii. Film
iv. Theater
3. Literary Arts
i. Poetry
ii. Stories
iii. Mythology
iv. Fairy Tales
4. Art History
i. Masters
ii. Masterworks
As you can hopefully see, many of these artistic areas overlap subjects like Language Arts, Literature, and History. Use them to help enrich your study of those other subjects, reminding your student that these are also arts, that they were created imaginatively.
We spent some time also looking at examples of some of these art forms.
We looked at representative paintings by Eric Dowdle to show that artists can produce artwork from nature, but that they often change it to make it more stylistic and abstract. (Look at all those great vocabulary words!) We looked at photographs by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange to show how two photographers used different techniques to produce beautiful photographs. (Adams manipulated the development process to cause subtle and beautiful changes in the final result; Lange put her greatest effort into composing the frame of the photograph to include only what she wanted to appear inside it.)
We looked at examples of both representative and abstract sculpture, talked about design being an avenue for the creation of something useful, how crafts are artworks that are generally useful and decorative in nature, how architecture can be an amazingly artistic and creative way to put design into reality (Google 'great architecture images' and see what amazing examples you'll find.), we found a picture of an amazing textile artwork created from nylon zippers!
My daughter, as our whole family, loves films. We watch a great many movies in our family. She enjoys theater--either live or on film. She was excited to learn that we would actually be watching films--or snippets of films--as part of our JSWA explorations.
She was also excited to learn that we were going to study literature--including her favorite: mythology--as part of our JSWA. OK, let me qualify that. She's not a big reader. And that's OK. Her natural educational talents lie elsewhere. But she does love mythology. We're going to compare how several different authors have handled the retelling of the old mythological tales, and how the structure of fairy tales work to exact a specific purpose--essentially, they are frightening stories told to children in a harsher world than the one in which we live meant to frighten them into obeying their parents.
We also talked about Art History. She was able to recognize the names of several great masters of art as well as several great masterworks. Here she is with Da Vinci's Mona Lisa:
After that we spent a little bit of time going over the rest of her curriculum for the year. She's a bit overwhelmed, but it's her 7th grade year. There's more to do. There won't be any more slacking with easy elementary age schoolwork.
Then we did a project--one that takes a bit more time than you might be prepared to handle with JSWA. This one took us close to an hour, though we could have been better prepared for it and done it much more simply.
We did a stop-animation film of a wizard vs. viking battle using Lego/Mega Block figurines, some clay, and some vegetables. We used a freeware program called JPG Video and a simple digital camera. Unfortunately it was taking WAY too long to upload it to Blogger, so you're just going to have make your own.
Then I broke the bad news to her. We were not, in fact, done with school for the day. It was only 10 A.M. No, no, my dear. Let's see what else we can get done. So, right now? Math. She can deal with math.
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