Adventures in Mama-Land

Well, not taking a holiday; that’s for sure!  We’ve been reading up a storm… here’s a selection of our current read-alouds… We’re also slowly making our way through our “ Winter Reading List ,” based on the Second Five in a Row unit study curriculum.  You can get the printable wall chart for that reading list here .  As with the First FIAR reading list we did last year, some of the books are wonderful; others are just so-so.  Links to all the books we’re reading are over here in the Official MamaLand Amazon Homeschool Curriculum n’ More Store .     So here's the big fat excuse for why I haven't been posting: our stupid !#$^ computer has been failing for a while, and when that happens, I end up spending 95% of my “relaxing” computer time just trying to make the thing work.  Finally, 2 weeks ago, one of the hard drives quit entirely and I ordered a new computer – well, a $250 out-of-date refurbished computer that I could stick the working hard drive into.  Which seems

  Well, it’s a bit late for September, but we’re still on-track with the Ambleside Online composer schedule , and we’ve moving on to our next composer:  Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy .  This is now our FOURTH composer (after Beethoven, Vivaldi, Chopin and Mozart), and unlike previous terms, instead of making up a CD of this term’s music, I’m sticking it all on my MP3 player.  So no photo of the cool CD! For our last two composers, I found a wonderful, simple,old-fashioned living book for kids (by Thomas Tapper), took the public-domain text and formatted it as a nice, printable 14-page booklet, including a notebooking page.   However, there is no Tapper book for Mendelssohn, so I wasn’t sure what to do.  I had already seen the book The World’s Great Men of Music , a public-domain book by Harriette Brower, but the text really didn’t look wonderful to me at first.  However… necessity being the mother of invention, and in the absence of other Mendelssohn resources, I finally decided to ad

Today we (belatedly) wrapped up our 3-month “study” of Mozart, which consisted of listening to his music (off and on; with a 3-week interruption in August); reading and listening to whatever we could about him, including this free printable Mozart mini-book I made from an old public domain etext. Here are a few other recommended Mozart resources: While listening to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, I read Naomi the biography of Mozart from the Making Music Fun site.  I was a bit disappointed by her narration, because she really didn’t seem to remember as much about him as she has from other composers.  But I think many of the important facts are in there, somewhere.  (this lovely narration page is also available as a free download ) (Naomi was very distracted during her narration by the fact that the bio mentions that he “Mozart died at 35 years of age” but doesn’t explain how he died, so I think this was preoccupying her rather than the facts of his life.) (Wikipedia says it was rheumatic

We are loosely following the Ambleside Composer rotation , and our composers for 2011-2012 are:  Bach, Bartok, Hindemith, Mendelssohn and Mozart.  (Bach is not in the Ambleside rotation this year, but because we go through the summer, I needed to throw in an extra composer – I chose to make it one of the “biggies”) I have created the following narration pages: The first page is blank.  The others are in a very simple format, with lots of space for written narration alongside a representative picture of the composer.  I know this is an eclectic list, but I hope at least a couple of the pages will be helpful to other families as well! A few notes on using these narration pages, from my own experience and from reading other parents’ experience and questions about narration on various classical / Charlotte Mason forums: First, choose a biography of the composer at your child’s level, such as the ones provided on the Making Music Fun site; we also like Classics for Kids .