Life Learning and Study Trails

No formal academics this week.

We are still on our Harry Potter learning trail.

Lots of spectacular friendship-with-nature for Aidan, me, Liam and Clare up at Grandma's cabin by the lake. (I just realized that what TS Eliot said rather darkly about popular literature seems to me to apply a bit to nature, too, in a good way -- I think children acquire something from casual "quantity time" life in the outdoors that they can't acquire so easily by studious "quality time", though both are beneficial).

We are learning from life by our chickenpox pestilence. The older children have been cooking.

Music: Clare on guitar, keyboard, violin, voice. Liam on classical guitar. Aidan listening to The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and Loreena McKennit. ... in the car as we shuttle from place to play.

I am thinking that we might study the pre-Raphaelites this year, in a friendship-with-art type of way. Reasons for this? I was listening to Loreena McKennit sing "The Lady of Shalott".... then just yesterday, by one of those coincidences, went googling John Waterhouse because of the picture on Melanie's header. Why did I look up her header painting? Because I felt a bit like that lady, who turns out to be Miranda of the Tempest. So then I found out that John William Waterhouse, and some of the other pre-Raphaelites, were also fascinated with the Lady of Shalott. There you go.... a study in the making.

What I'm thinking is Giotto and Architecture in the first half of the year, and connect by way of Shakespeare from there to the pre-Raphaelites. Plus, it looks to my amateur art sensibilities like some of the 19th century illustrators may have been influenced by the pre-Raphaelites.... which is another connection. This is fun....