The Week That Was . . .

We've been having such wonderful, beautiful, delicious weather that Baby Boy and I can hardly concentrate on anything other than sitting on the patio and taking Baby Doggy for walks.


We did manage to get all of our assignments done, and we are both pleased to be almost finished with several of his subjects for this term.


We've completed Music Theory and our Movies as Literature this week. Actually and honestly, we ditched the Movies as Literature, we only had two more movies to watch, but neither of us were all that jazzed about them, so we decided to call it a year on that. Don't get me wrong, if you've looked at this for your own student, it's an excellent curriculum. It's very unique and requires real analysis, easily as much as a good rigorous literature curriculum would require, if not more, because with the visual, there is so much you are expected to notice. You end up practically watching each movie four or five times. For almost every question, Baby Boy and I found ourselves reviewing the scenes to make sure we didn't miss any subtleties. It's been a lot of fun, but we're just done, LOL. This is the time of year we get antsy and don't want to waste our days away watching television. We have some other literature activities that we're doing that are not curriculum and textbook based. It's just one of the perks of homeschooling, I guess.


Of course we did get a chance to get our art projects done this week. We studied Expressionism, which we learned is two giant steps away from realism. That's what we liked best about it, because we tend to do art that doesn't look very realistic whether we are trying to or not, LOL. It's more of a visual display of how you emotionally feel when you see something in nature. This week we did our own renditions of Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Rising Sun (We have pretty high self esteem, don't we? I mean we really aim high! he he he).

The original, Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Rising Sun illustrating Expressionism

Another version of Expressionism by Baby Boy

And yet another, by Mom #1

In case you're wondering, yes, we did at least have fun, LOL.


I know this post is getting long, but one more thing. We went to see my niece, who I love dearly, play an original composition at a piano for her school last night. It was actually the neatest thing I have ever seen. She goes to an all girls private school. Anyway, the girls are learning how to compose music that is uniquely them. So they are used regular music notation as well as graphic notation (which is just a fancy word for pictures) in their music scores. During the performance, they showed each girl's photo and a copy of the actual work she created on the overhead projector while we listened to them play the piece.


The pieces are untitled, but they did provide descriptions. Here's the description my niece's piece:

I have chosen to focus on shifting emotions, moving from happiness to anger, then sadness. Gradual healing begins and then returns us to a state of happiness once again.

The quality of this video is pretty pathetic, because the lighting was down in the auditorium so we could see the slides on the overhead projector, plus I was using a regular camera, not a video camera, so . . . it's really important that you understand that before you get too excited to see it.

Proud moments aren't only for moms, they are for aunties too!

Until next time . . .