Art and music resources

Our local Charlotte Mason mothers' group (how lucky I am!) meets tonight, and we are planning to talk about art and music, CM style and share favourite resources. Here are a few of mine ...

Art
I particularly like books that combine picture study with hands-on activities (that way I get to cover two subjects in one go!).

Artists Workshop: Animals by Penny King and Clare Roundhill is one of a series (other titles are Landscapes, Stories, Portraits, Myths and Legends and Sports and Games). Each book has a double page spread focused on a specific work of art, followed by another with art activities inspired by it. The artwork and activities are both very varied, ranging from stone-age cave paintings to modern art.

Oxford First Book of Art by Gillian Wolfe. Similar to the Artists Workshop series, but each double page spread includes two or three works of art linked to a theme, a "look closer" section, and a suggested activity.

Discovering Great Artists: Hands-on Art for Children in the Style of the Great Masters by MaryAnn Kohl and Kim Solga. An activity based book with numerous art projects, including a useful table showing the difficulty level of each. You would need to find another source to view the original works of art by each artist (easy enough with the internet).

Artistic Pursuits. This is a full scale art curriculum which combines picture study with art instruction. Begins with books for 5 to 8 year olds and goes right up to high school level. We have only dabbled in the two books we have - pregnancy inertia took over - but I like them a lot. You can even buy kits containing all the materials needed for each book.

There are a number of art books for small people I am looking forward to getting out to use again with Little Cherub ...

For picture study I Spy: An Alphabet in Art and other books by Lucy Micklethwait, including Numbers in Art, Animals in Art and A Child's Book of Art (one I missed last time round that looks wonderful). Lots of great art in picture book format.

Usborne's Playtime series was a wonderful source of art and craft ideas for this art-challenged mother ... titles include I Can Cut and Stick, I Can Finger Paint, I Can Crayon and I Can Draw Animals.

Music
iTunes. Or any other source of music downloads. Being able to buy just the music I want to listen to rather than having to buy an entire CD, half of which I didn't really want, is wonderful.

The Best of ... series (like this Best of Haydn CD) produced by Naxos - covers all the major composers and reasonably priced.

Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten - a great way of introducing children to the different instruments of the orchestra.

Having instruments available for children to experiment with. They do not need to be anything fancy - a recorder and some percussion instruments would be plenty to start with.

I have never bothered with books about music or composers - probably because I always think of music as something we do.