The Beauty of Art & Music

One of the things I love about homeschooling is the way it has created a little free time for the arts starting in elementary school.

Someone gave us a piano to use just before we moved here.  In October 2012, we unloaded it into our house and hired a piano tuner.  While she was here I asked her for piano teacher recommendations.  One of her recommendations was Miss Lindsey, the girl who was already teaching art at Adam’s co-op.  Lindsey had already suggested to me that Adam might benefit from a one on one tutoring in art because she saw his interest in it.

A teacher who comes to our house and can teach him both piano and art? I couldn’t imagine anything better!

Adam started classes in December.  David and I took an occasional class and thought we’d learn it alongside him.  I dropped out after a month and David dropped off about a month later because we simply weren’t finding the time discipline to practice for thirty minutes every night. I needed a mom who said, “You need to go do your piano practice now and then made me do it whether I felt like starting or not. 🙂

Liam begged and begged and begged to be allowed to start.  He has loved music from the time he was a baby, picking up rhythms everywhere and singing before he talked.  He would often sit at the piano and play.  While most children just sort of bonged and banged, his banging usually sounded somewhat melodic and pleasing.  By the time he was five, he was picking out simple melodies on his own, sometimes coming home from church and picking out a hymn we sang note by note. Finally in February of this year, a few months before his sixth birthday, we decided to let him try.  The discipline has been a stretch for him.  He loves to play by ear, and needing to work at finger play that did not come easily was a stretch. Especially since it only yielded simple tunes and he could forget the books and play a song by ear.  We backed off a bit on the intensity of his lessons so he wouldn’t lose the fun of it and now he is enjoying it so much again.

David listened to Adam practicing the other night, shook his head, and said, “That makes me jealous.” It’s amazing what you can learn in two years!

Adam is loving his art classes, too.  After exploring composition, perspective and shading for a bit, he experimented with oils and found what he loves.  He’s working on a series of animal paintings and dreams of selling artwork someday.

(Those horizontal lines are not part of the painting or the wall. See note at the bottom of post.)

As a stay at home mom, I love having another adult walk into my house once a week! Lindsey feels as much like my friend as she is the boys’ teacher!  We share recipes we love, stories about our day, and she is my go to person when I have a question about something locally.

As a relatively left-brained teacher and parent, I love seeing the boys have opportunity to exercise and develop the right side of their brain.  Piano has also taught them discipline, developed their ear, and given them opportunity to perform publicly on occasion. Art allows them to be creative and a little messy …. things I’m not so good at carving out space and time for in the afternoons when I’m through teaching and needing to get on with housework.  Lindsey has developed talents in them I would never have been able to pull out because I don’t have them myself, and I am forever grateful to her.

As Plato said, “I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and in the arts are the keys to learning.”

PS: Please excuse the odd linear issues in some of the pictures.  We’re having issues with our internet currently and it’s showing up in some odd ways. Hopefully we’ll get the kinks worked out soon. 🙂

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