Astronomy: Van Gogh, Mozart & Mother Goose

Logan's Starry Night

I like to tie art, music, and literature into any of our unit studies for a blend of Montessori and Charlotte Mason methods. Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night was an obvious choice to correspond with our Introduction to Astronomy. We looked again at our photographs of the universe and then spent some time looking at Starry Night.

My five year old liked the colors in this painting.  And because Van Gogh's brush strokes are bold it is easy even for a younger child to notice the unique line. Logan liked the way the stars "shine."

We looked at these two different self-portraits and Logan noticed the difference in color and the straight lines of one in contrast to the curvy lines of the other.  He felt the portrait on the left was happy while the one on the right seemed sad. I printed Starry Night and these portraits from Costco's new online picture gallery in their photo center for what I felt was a very reasonable price.

 

I sketched the outlines of the painting onto black card stock, although there are many different coloring pages, such as this one, online you could print out as well. I chose to sketch it on dark paper so he wouldn't have to fill in every single space to have the colors he wanted show through. He then added his lines with pastels, but decided he wanted to add more stars to his picture.

As I have mentioned in one of my earlier posts, my sons are taking Suzuki music lessons.  The first months of Logan's viola lessons have been spent learning "Twinkle" variations.  The other day he was noticing how many songs can be sung to this melody, Twinkle, Baa Baa Black Sheep, the alphabet...He was thrilled when I played Mozart's   "Ah vous dirai-ja maman."  Click here to listen to it at ClassicsForKids.com, one of my favorite music resources for children.  I like to receive their free newsletter as it can be difficult to find their lessons when I revisit the site another time for some reason. The picture above is from a kit we ordered from the Michael Olaf company about famous musicians. It has just enough biographical info on the back.

 Some books we've read about Mozart. We used Mozart Finds a Melody with our Bird Unit this summer as well because in the story his Canary helps Mozart to write his music.

My children already know the words to "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" but I wanted them to do a little memorization and copy work today so I thought "Hey Diddle Diddle" could fit in as well. I ordered a PDF file with copy work for nursery rhymes at Lulu.com for about $5.  This 300 page plus packet has beautiful vintage illustrations and various activities.  It think we will get some good use out of it.

We have several collections with nursery rhymes so Logan went and gathered as many variations of this one as he could find and compared them.  He drew his own illustration on the back of his copy page.  This one is from a collection beautifully illustrated by Scott Gustafson.



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