In Classical Conversations from week 13 to week 18 the children do an art project from this book to go with a different artist each week.  When we were part of CC, I always did more at home about each artist because my kids really love art, and by doing a second project at home, they remembered the artist better.  With weeks 13 to 18 starting soon, I prepared a list of additional activities and information about each artist for Cycle 2.  I am limiting it to just a few clicks per artist so it won’t be overwhelming.

{This post may contain affiliate links of items that I use and like.  Thank you for your support of this blog and our family by purchasing through our links.}

Rembrandt

There was a wealth of information for Rembrandt and it was a challenge narrowing it down.

• A biography geared for kids.  Another (more detailed) biography at Garden of Praise.
• The Rembrandt Teaching Project – website with two detailed art appreciation lessons, plus go-along lessons across the subjects for two of his works of art, and many more. You’ll have to explore it.
• Detailed art lesson on Rembrandt – art history, art appreciation and video art lesson.  There’s actually enough lessons here to study Rembrandt for a month!
• Two books to add to your collection (or to find at the library):

Rembrandt (Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists)

Rembrandt and the Boy Who Drew Dogs: A story about Rembrandt van Rijn.  The author of the second book has a website with Rembrandt activities.

Linnaeus

The CC focus for Linnaeus is his botanical illlustrations.  There was little that came up in my searches for art lessons with regards to Linnaeus; most of the results referred to taxonomy.  Consequently, I will be writing an art lesson to go with Linnaeus and posting it next week.  You can sign up for email updates to make sure you don’t miss it.

Gainsborough

• A biography at Garden of Praise.  I like Garden of Praise because many of the artists works are included within the biography.  A shorter biography.
• Gainsborough Art Stickers

Monet

There are so many projects out there for Monet.  Again, I narrowed it down to two so as not to overwhelm.

• Biography
• Art Lesson for a young child
• Art Lesson for an older child

• Books for your collection:

Claude Monet: Sunshine and Waterlilies (my favorite),

Monet (Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists),

Linnea in Monet’s Garden (a bit long – my son won’t sit through it, but Bear likes it),

The Magical Garden of Claude Monet (This is a Lawrence Anholt book and I like his artist books a lot.  We own quite a few of them.)

• Book we haven’t read, but looks good:Claude Monet: The Painter Who Stopped the Trains

Degas

• Biography
• Art Lessons – I love this final project, but I haven’t bought the lesson.  This is a pretty project, too, but there are no step by step plans.  The paper dolls are probably the simplest project.
• Books for your collection

Edgar Degas: Paintings That Dance
Degas and the Little Dancer
Edgar Degas (Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists)
Chasing Degas – Beautiful illustrations and cute story, but not as informative as the rest.

I love the Smart About Art and the Anholt books the best.

Morisot

• Biography
• Art Appreciation at Practical Pages.  She also has more lessons based on other Morisot artwork.

Which artist are you looking forward to the most?

Karen at Wisdom and Righteousness has again made her superb lapbooks to go along with Classical Conversations Cycle 2.  You can see my review here for the Cycle 1 lapbooks.

These lapbooks allow your children to write out their memory work and review it in a more visual and interactive way.  This year, there is an option to make the lapbook into a binder.  This is the option we will go with.  It forms a nice keepsake at the end of the year. There are 4 lapbooks – one for each 6 week portion of CC.

Here is a photo montage from her site to give you an idea of what it can look like.

Karen provides layout suggestions and there are clear recommendations for which pages to print on cardstock or color.  I always just print everything out on regular paper, but the color does make it much more appealing.

Every year, Karen makes adjustments to her lapbooks based on feedback from parents who are using them. She works hard to make sure there are slight differences in how the memory work gets “displayed” in the lapbook so that students can have a variety from year to year.  This year, her way to practice the skip counting is quite innovative, but the one thing I wish is that last year’s (to just write out the times tables) had still been included as an option.  The Science Memory work is full of beautiful photographs (for the biomes) and in some instances clipart.  I love the addition of the artist minibook, featuring art from each artist studied in the 3rd quarter.  There’s also scripture memory copy work and a timeline.  Karen has thought of everything.

We’re doing a modified version of the memory work at home, but I still plan to print out most of this great resource. Specifically, we’re using the Latin, Geography, Science, artists and music.  It’s great for warm up to the day and for hands-on interactive review.

Now you can win your own copy of the lapbooks for Cycle 2.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

None of these are affiliate links.  I like Montessori Print Shop printables and thought it would be useful to have a link of all the MPS grammar products that correlate to Classical Conversations Cycle 2.  When I couldn’t find a printable, I linked to other blogs and their corresponding Montessori grammar lesson.  There were still many weeks for which I could not find Montessori activities for, but  Half A Hundred Acre Wood has a blog post with many worksheets and other resources for every single week of Cycle 2.

Week 1 Parts of Speech – Farm game (articles, noun, adjectives, verb, and adverbs) Here’s a post that explains the grammar farm.

Week 2 Pronouns – a Montessori Pronoun Lesson

Week 14 Adverbs

Week 15 Four Purposes of Sentences – I found a free sentence sort that would be Montessori-ish at Teachers Pay Teachers.

Week 16 Verb

Also this noun and verb activity ties week 16 to week 17.

Week 17 Noun – noun sorting (free)

Week 21 Conjunction – not a printable, but a great Montessori lesson on conjunctions.

Week 23 Adjective – Logical Adjective Cards, Detective Adjective Game, Command Cards for Detective Adjective Game.

Week 24 Interjection – Grammar boxes for the elementary student includes interjections, as well as the other parts of speech.  Grammar boxes are explained in this post.

Montessori For Everyone has a blog post of games to play to teach the parts of speech.

Kristen, of Teaching Stars, is spending the week reviewing their homeschool curriculum and I thought I would join in to share what we have loved and what has not worked for us.  I already posted about All About Reading yesterday, before I knew of Kristen’s plan.  Today I am going to review Classical Conversations and what I love and don’t love about it.

Classical Conversations.  We have spent two years in a community.  I have tutored the first half of the year during both years.  We are not going back to the community this year.  Why?  I answered that question quickly in this post, but Kristen asked for more specifics and so here they are.

First, what I love:

I love the idea of memory work…but…I don’t love all of the memory work chosen by CC.

I love the people in our community (and I needed that community two years ago because we had no one to turn to for homeschooling support) …but…I don’t love paying all that money just for community.

I love the fine arts component…but… I don’t love repeating the same few artists and composers every three years when there is such a wealth of them to get to know.

I love the presentations the children have to give every week in front of their peers.

I love the timeline song and the cards to go with it.

I love the math skip counting songs.

What I do not love:

The history memory work.  The sentences, especially in Cycle 1, are not chronological and while I understand that they are grouped geographically, I much prefer a chronological history. Also, some of the sentences just weren’t well worded, especially for Cycle 1.  This year my friend and I have taken the timeline cards and made a three sentence synopsis for each that we hope to have our children memorize instead.  Unfortunately, we can’t share it since the timeline is copyrighted by CC and most of our synopses are straight from the back of the card.

That the memory work, especially history, goes so fast.  A week on Ancient Egypt?  Really?

That the memory work is out of context.  I don’t fully buy into the whole memorize out of context philosophy.  My kids prefer a bit of background info.  But see my previous point on how fast we are forced to go through the memory work and how it doesn’t leave time to delve into a subject the way my kids would like.

Tin whistle.  Cacophony.  Headaches.  I much prefer piano lessons, though I did appreciate the music theory we learned.  Again, though, I wish it weren’t the same thing repeated every year so that the older children could learn a bit more theory than is actually presented.  It’s a good base, though, for the non-musically inclined.

The science “experiments” (except for a few – like the owl pellet).  I felt that most of these were not the greatest experiments.  Actually, they are mostly demonstrations and not experiments.  There was not much opportunity to expand and teach further concepts and they jumped around topic-wise.

Losing a day each week.  My days are precious and my time with my children is precious.  I want to give them a much broader science and fine arts experience than CC Foundations can provide.  I need that fifth day lost to CC to ensure that we can fit the arts and science into our schedule.  Also, we would prefer to lose days to do field trips with a second homeschool group, or to do more extracurricular activities than be tied to CC.

The expense.  I have two kids who would be in the Foundations level this year.  The price tag comes to about $1000.  This sounds silly, but I’d rather go to the beach for a week with the money I save by doing CC at home.  We build better family memories at the beach with Daddy than we do at CC and ultimately, I want my children to treasure their childhoods and their special time on vacation with us.

This does not mean that I wouldn’t consider Essentials or Challenge further down the road, but for now, we are done with Foundations, though you may still see occasional CC posts on the blog since we will be doing it, albeit in a modified way, at home.

So what would I keep from CC?
Memory work (a mix of their choices and my own additions)
The CC memory CDs to play in the car
Memory Master Flashcards (even if we change up some of the memory work, I like to have these in my purse)
The timeline song
The idea of fine arts enrichment but then doing it my way
Presentations done in front of peers (a group of moms and I have a little group going that meets once a month and we do presentations about different countries during that time)

I truly hope this post is helpful to families considering CC.  We enjoyed our two years in it.  We had a hard time deciding not to return this coming year and spent a lot of time in prayer to come to that decision.  I don’t dislike the program, but it isn’t for every family.  Mostly CC families only rave about the program. Not many people talk about what they don’t prefer about it.   I don’t think that is fair to prospective families.  My prayer with this post is that it gives another perspective.