Passport to Paris at the Denver Art Museum

D had the day off yesterday, and we took off to see the Denver Art Museum's Passport to Paris Exhibit. R spent a long time looking at this Cezanne painting, House in the Country. She liked being able to get up close and examine the short rough parallel brushstrokes. We talked about how the branches gave it a kind of wild energy, with the house more serene and recessed in the background.
We decided to make a special-occasion day of it, and start with a French meal at Le Central. I had moules frites au pistou. R didn't like the mussels, but she loved dipping her bread in the hot garlicky wine broth. Le Central has been around for 33 years, and the menu is authentic and affordable French country cooking.

We had our wedding rehearsal dinner here, on the beautiful back patio with lights twinkling and friends and family from across the country together in one room. I love this picture 11+ years later. The chef has brochures that talk about his background, hometown of Toulon and the style of cooking there. I made myself hold back and not push the "this is educational!" enthusiasm on R, and she ended up reading it and asking about Provence and Toulon and wanting to make some of the recipes. 

The "Passport to Paris"exhibit featured Impressionist paintings on loan from other collections, and it was pretty spectacular. The first rooms were earlier works that placed them in the context of Louis XIV and life at Versailles, and revealed how changes in art and society mirrored each other. R liked the antiques, particularly the 18th century sedan chair and the description of aristocrats carried in them because the streets flowed with mud and raw sewage. She asked for a print of the painting above, Louis Anquetin's 'Avenue de Clichy,' so she could take it home and hang it next to her bed and pretend at night that she's walking down a nighttime street in Paris.

R said her favorite piece of the day was this endearing little menu drawn by Paul Gaugin in 1900, in watercolor and conté crayon, illustrating the La Fontaine fable of the fox and the crow. It was in the Drawing Room collection of French drawings, framed next to another Gauguin menu featuring a Breton and Tahitian woman talking having a conversation.

Before Christmas we had watched the lively and entertaining BBC series, The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution, with art writer Waldemar Januszczak. It was a revelation as he blew the dust off some of the clichés that trap impressionists on candy boxes and umbrellas and silk scarves. One of the saddest stories in the documentary was Gaugin's love for his children, and heartbreak when his wife left him and took them away because he failed to live up to her family's idea of a respectable middle class provider. That made this little menu all the more touching, since it was painted after Gaugin had traveled alone to Tahiti. It gives a glimpse into his relaxed humor with friends. From the museum's website, "The menu planned for the evening’s dinner appears in a whimsical combination of French and Tahitian. It began with aperitifs and “foutimaises assorties,” a made-up word derived from the word “foutaises,” meaning something silly."

We ended our day with a visit to the Art Studio on the first floor, that was set up with various stations to practice methods of drawing. Still life tableaux, poseable anatomical models of people and animals, easels, paper and every kind of medium from crayons to charcoal to sumi ink. Videos of working artists were playing, and you could pick up a book about drawing and sit down at one of the tables to study it. There was a station for scribble drawing, and one for making your own drawing machine.

This wall-size drawing machine used pens that could be tied at different lengths to trace arcs and circles. The Paul Klee quote says, "A drawing is simply a line going for a walk."

R's finished charcoal still life.

She pinned it to the art wall when we left.

We love the art museum, and this is one of the best days we've ever had there. Being able to visit in the middle of the day on a Tuesday is one of the best things about our homeschooling schedule.

History Curriculum

Before I go into what we're working on for history this year, I'd like to clarify my earlier post. It's important to me to be fair to her school when I talk about our reasons for leaving it. The school did a lot of things right. The staff is dedicated to teaching and instilling faith in their students. R had some great years there with passionate teachers, but also some discouraging ones, with teachers who seemed to be just putting in their time. We have five years of good memories and are grateful for what she learned there. By all accounts that school works well for a lot of kids. We also knew many families who transferred their kids out for various reasons, some that paralleled ours.

One of the first subject areas I researched this summer was history/social studies. I felt a "could this really be true?" excitement when I saw how much we could cover with one-on-one instruction. I went to a Great Books college for undergrad, and I liked the idea of a classical curriculum. I looked at some curricula that we could just unbox and start teaching, and while they were tempting because I am so new and inexperienced in all this, we ended up putting together our own approach and sources. The Well Trained Mind forums were the most helpful source I found for researching and getting feedback from homeschooling parents. (Susan Wise Bauer's book The Well Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home has been the best jumping-off point for us. It's an invaluable book.) 

We decided to use K12's  The Human Odyssey Volume 1: Prehistory Through the Middle Ages as our main text. K12 is a full curriculum, but we wanted to use only this book. I found this, and most of our books, used on Amazon or eBay.

Again based on recommendations from the Well Trained Mind forums, we supplement the textbook with individual volumes from The World in Ancient Times series from Oxford University Press.

 

So far we use these Oxford Press books the most. They have turned out to be perfect, at just the right reading level to be challenging without being so difficult that R gets discouraged. We use the workbooks and study guides from the Oxford Press series for some volumes. 

What we are both loving about homeschool is that we can take our time exploring all kinds of additional sources. My dad is a retired history professor and my mom a retired English teacher, and we have inherited some wonderful books from their library. Others come from our local library, or from thrift stores, library book sales, garage sales or online sources for used books.

We watch a lot of documentaries on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and check others out from the library. We also use our desktop computer and the iPad for interactive presentations, to research new words and questions that come up, and to go more deeply into ideas that R likes. She was interested in the pharaohs' journeys through the underworld, so we watched a National Geographic "Egyptian Secrets of the Afterlife" documentary. It dramatized the afterlife journey of Seti I guided by the Book of Gates, and made the history come alive for her.

I feel nervous all the time, that we are missing important lessons or going too deeply but not broadly enough. When she goes back to school, it will be with students who have been preparing to do well on tests that cover specific material. Whether or not we agree with that, it's the academic world she will have to function in for many years to come, and I wonder if it's a mistake to lead her away from that approach. When we first started, I was surprised to see that R's skills are mostly limited to completing worksheets. She wants to choose from multiple choice bubbles, and gets impatient when I ask her to think critically. "What's the answer? Just tell me the answer you're looking for." That seems so fundamentally wrong to me, that I'm willing to take a risk to try to turn that tide. How will we feel if it turns out she's not testing as highly, because she's learning differently for right now?

D and I agree that we're taking the long view, and we have to be brave about it. In many ways, it's been like watching her brain wake up, and recapture the curiosity and confidence of her early childhood. She will read a textbook in after school hours because she's interested in, say, Mesopotamian cuneiform script. She wants to use it as a guide to make up her own symbol language to exchange notes with her friend E. Is she missing out because she's doing that instead of homework that covers more ground more shallowly, where her knowledge will be measured by a chapter test? 

The fortunate thing about starting this in 2014 is the internet resources that are available now, and the guidance and encouragement from other parents who have been down this road.