We've used various things over the years in an on again/off again approach and so this year I decided I'd really like us to take a more disciplined approach to learning new hymns and revisiting our favourites.
The best way to make sure we keep incorporating something like this into our home educating day is to find a space where we can realistically fit it into the learning schedule. If it's on my schedule there is a better chance of us getting electives done.
I found the obvious space for us to slot our hymn studies was during our 45 minute bible lesson time slot which we enjoy first thing, before any of our other learning time starts, and the hymn gets played randomly at other times during the day (helps support the regular & repetitive approach that works so well for Bobs and Dasiy).
1: Select a few hymns for our 6 week term and learn them, really learn them by regular and repetitive exposure.
2: Introduce other pieces by the same composer.
3: Reading some living literature about the composer.
4: Employ narration exercises from our read aloud time (orally, only for us here).
5: Add the composers timeline figure and/or details to our book of time (we do this during our 5th week of learning).
Another natural extension to the above, is for us to read through the bible passages that helped birth, or support, the theme of the hymn.
Since our learning terms are 6 weeks long selecting 1 or 2 hymns to learn by heart is very doable.
(Our 6 week learning cycle: 4 weeks of focused work then the 5th week is to tidy up projects, then 1 weeks break.)
Selecting our current hymn and it's lyricist, I'll detail a little of what a series of lessons around one hymn/composer can currently look like in our home.
If we are already familiar with the hymn and the lyricist, or musical composer, being detailed in the book we have chosen to learn from (think John Newton & Amazing Grace) we'll read the excerpt from that book of choice, listen to the hymn, either on c/d or via you-tube, and move along to another lyricist or hymn we are not so familiar with.
Sometimes the hymn/lyricist/composer we are wanting to study is often not found in the book

This term we are learning Soldiers of the Cross Arise and introducing Jesus, Lover of My Soul or O for a Thousand Tongues. Those will then complete our study on lyricist Charles Wesley whom we started learning about the previous term. The excerpts we are reading to go with the above hymns come from this book:

Right, back to the topic of Soldiers & Armour - there are a good number of copywork sheets available to use with Ephesians 6 dotted around the internet .... if you don't feel like creating your own.
Along with with copywork sheets there are also some rather nice colour in pages and sunday school crafts, like this one ,that one can find using g.oo.gle and if you're looking for a Full Armor of God page for a girl don't forget to visit Nadene of Practical Pages page here.
7 comments:
This sounds really great! I still want to apply much more ... wish my children really learnt the words and knew the hymns as well as I would like ... We'll keep pressing in and taking our hymn study deeper as the kids mature. Thanks for your link to my armor page!
Blessings,
Nadene
It's currently working for us, so I'm happy :-)
Looking forward to reading about your 'more and deeper' studies .. I like the way you approach things!
Since editing my posts in blogger just seems to scramble to line adjustment I'll add a link to Nadene's hymn studies below (really nice approach Nadene!!!).
http://practicalpages.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/hymn-study-schedule-for-2011/#comment-4097
Thanks for detailing this Chelle I like the nice-n-natural way you've included this in your learning day.
Flis
Flis, it feels "nice-n-natural" too which is why we are still enjoying hymn studies this year. Let us know how you get on .
What a beautiful blog you have! I found you through the Sonlight blog roll hop.
I love finding other Sonlighter's from different countries! We school "on the road" much of the year but only in the U.S.
Going to 'follow' you. Stop in and 'see' us too, if you get the chance.
(: Shelby
sweetviewfromthehills.blogspot.com
Thanks for the kind comment.
I'm 'hopping over' to visit now :-)
Welcome to my HS rambling spot, I'm
always happy to have someone follow.
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