Year in Review: Family Studies (2018-2019)

I read through last year's Family Studies post just now so much of it holds true for this year as well.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right??

Since that's the case, I'm not going to elaborate on all the pieces.  Please see last year's post for a fuller description.

Also, I recently hosted a day on the CharlotteMasoniRL Instagram account where I went into detail about our family studies.  Here's a link to all the posts I've done for CMiRL, not only about the most recent series about Family Studies, but also A Day in the Life, and a series about how I plan.

Subjects We Study as a Family

In our family studies, we tackle subjects together at set times during the day and week.  Some of my children will have additional readings or work in these areas, and some will do all their work in this area with the family.  Our family studies include:

As Part of Morning Prayer

• Lives of Saints
• Mass Readings
• Hymns

As Part of Morning Time

• Folk Songs in English and Spanish
• Poetry
• Memory Work
• Literature
• Nature Lore
• Historical Fiction

As Part of Group Work

• Picture Study
• Composer Study
• Geography
• Folk Dance
• Drill
• Bible

As Part of Our Family Life

• Plutarch (one evening a week)
• Shakespeare (one evening a week, and I also led a Shakespeare study with other families in the fall and spring where we read different plays than we read in the family)
• Nature Study and Journaling (as a family on Sunday afternoons)
• Art Instruction (on Sunday mornings after Mass and caffeine)
• Family Keeping Meeting (Saturday morning, where we all, parents included, share our keeping work from the past week)

Books and Resources

Lives of Saints

We've enjoyed reading about the Saint of the day through this series of (free) ebooks from CatholicCulture.org.  They are my favorite Saint of the day resources by far.

Picture Study

David
Turner
Monet

I highly recommend getting physical prints, and I really like the print sets from Riverbend Press.  I used the Simply Charlotte Mason Monet set because I had it from a previous year (and didn't get to that year...) and then printed additional prints at Staples because I only had one set. I like the Riverbend Press sets better than the SCM one as they are more affordable but still beautiful.  I really don't like having to get my own prints made, but I did swap out a couple of Monet choices so we could take advantage of a Monet exhibit in SF and study some of the paintings were were able to see.

Hymns

Ordinary Time
The King of Love My Shepherd Is
All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name
O Queen of the Holy Rosary
Our God, Our Help in Ages Past

Lent
Were You There
The Glory of These Forty Days

Easter
Thine Be the Glory

We had new songs for Advent and Christmas too, but I can't find any records of what they are on my computer and the song books are with all our Advent things in our storage area.  I should probably have a running list of these books in case I ever needed to recreate them...  and I'll be needing to make an additional book here soon as my younger kids gain reading fluency.

Folk Songs

English

• Blow the Man Down
• The Ash Grove
• Oh My Darling, Clementine
• Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground
• Battle Hymn of the Republic
• Polly Wolly Doodle

Spanish

• La Araña Pequeñita
• Los Elefantes

Not nearly as many as we should be learning, but something is better than nothing, right?

Folk Dances

• The Geud Man of Ballangigh (learned at CM West :: Retreat in Old San Juan)
• Heel Toe Polka
• Virginia Reel

Poetry

• Rime of the Ancient Mariner and other Poetry by Coleridge
• Waiting on the Word (Advent)
• Word in the Wilderness (Lent)
• John Brown's Body (An Epic poem about the Civil War - loved this, but it did require some on the fly editing)
• Poems Every Catholic Should Know
• The Oxford Book of Children's Verse

Plutarch

• Finished Alexander the Great, which we started the previous school year
• Julius Caesar
• Demosthenes

We haven't used Anne White's books for Plutarch for awhile, but I decided to pick one up for Demosthenes.  It was nice to get back to it, and I appreciate her notes and how she breaks up the life into readings.  That being said, I would really like to own a complete set of Plutarch's Lives in hardback someday...

Shakespeare

• Finished Henry IV, Part 2
• Henry V
• Hamlet (with our Shakespeare group)
• Much Ado About Nothing
• As You Like It (with our Shakespeare group)
• Julius Caesar (in progress - we will continue this over the summer)

Memory Work

• Old Ironsides, by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
• Gettysburg Address
• Henry V, Act III, Scene I (One more unto the breach, dear friends...)
• Hamlet, Act III, Scene I (To be, or not to be...)
• O Captain, My Captain by Walt Whitman
• Psalm 23
• Henry V, Act 4, Scene iii (St. Crispian's Day speech)
• Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene ii (If you have tears, prepare to shed them now...)
• From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

Better than last year, but still... and I think I need to balance out the Shakespeare with some more poetry and Scripture selections.

Literature, Nature Lore, or Historical Fiction Morning Time Books

• Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin
• One Day on Beetle Rock (Such a great nature lore book!)
• Sun Slower Sun Faster
• The Ranch of the Golden Flowers (a light, fun California historical fiction that we all enjoyed)
• From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (some of the family got to go to the Met this spring and I just had to read this to the kids!)
• Peter Pan (this started as a read aloud to my 1B kids, but after a couple chapters I realized everyone else was listening in too so I moved it to Morning Time - a definite favorite!)

Composer Study

• Chopin
• Dvorak

I always feel a little embarrassed about how Composer Study plays out (or, really, doesn't) in our home.  Even though I've given a talk on Music Study in the Mason Curriculum (twice!), composer study is one of the first things to go when I am struggling.  Noise makes things so much worse for me, and even beautiful music counts as noise when I'm floundering.  And in Term 2, I was definitely needing to cut back and have less noise in my life!

I have at least figured out a way to include casual listening to the composer's pieces.  I set a piece as an alarm that goes off before our group work begins.  When that piece starts playing, it signals to the kids that they need to wrap up their work and get ready for group work.  This only works for pieces that are less than 6-7 minutes long though, but it has worked well for this year's composers who have a large selection of shorter pieces.

Art Instruction

We finished Alisha Gratehouse's Drawing 101 Course at The Masterpiece Society as a family.  Our teen, who has spent more time drawing than the rest of us combined, found it too easy to be helpful, and it was a little too challenging for our 13 and 10 year old boys who only draw when they have to.  My husband and I benefited from it a lot though, and felt it was well worthwhile.

We decided we wanted something that was more specifically focused on nature study drawing after this, and we've been doing some of John Muir Laws' How to Draw Plants series.  Video instruction seems to work very well for us to do drawing instruction as a group.  This summer, we've also started working on some watercolor videos from The Mind of Watercolor.