Van Gogh

Van Gogh was our first artist studied this year. We are spending 2-3 weeks on each artist looking through books about their paintings. Then on a following week they are trying to re-create their version of one of the artists paitings. Here are my 4 youngest kids attempts at some of Van Gogh's famous works.


This is my 5 year old son's version of Van Gogh's Sunflowers.


Here is Natania's version of Starry Night, she is 10 years old.


Another version of Starry Night done by my almost 13 year old daughter, Arianna.


This is Van Gogh's portrait of Dr. Felix Rey 1889. I'm not sure why she picked such a hard picture to try to re-create but she did a great in job. In my humble opinion. Annaliese is only 8 years old.

Here are a few sentences from the kids narration pages.

Van Gogh shot himself because he was so depressed because of Paul Gaugin leaving him. He got so angry that he cut off part of his ear. by Annaliese.

Van Gogh was a great artist. He started out painting with dark colors and made alot of dark and sad paintings. Van Gogh used oil paints. Van Gogh shot himself and died two days later. My favorite paintings by Van Gogh are Starry Night and Sunflowers. by Arianna

Vincent Van Gogh was a famous painter. He had one brother. Vincent went to Paris to paint. He invited Paul Gaugin to paint with him but they had a big fight and Paul left. He was very angry that he cut part of his ear off. Vincent never got over this. When he painted it was so thick that he would run out of paint, so he had to stop buying food. And he was not healthy. Vincent shot himself and he died two days later. by Natania

Charlotte Mason Picture Study

When I first started reading about Charlotte Mason and her ideas on education I was so encouraged. With a large family it is often hard to implement art and music. The CM method has allowed us to study both. I'm going to write just a little bit on Charlotte's philosophy on picture study. Now I am no expert on her style of teaching but the one thing I cherish is her ease of studying art with young children. I started when my kids were about 5-7 years old. We would take an artist, read a child's biography and then find books with paintings by that artist. First we would look at the picture and discuss the colors, what we liked or didn't like, the shadows, the scenery, things like that. Then we would turn the picture over and take turns remembering the details of the painting. It was always so interesting to see who remembered what. We have implemented this style of learning off in on through our years of studying art. It is a wonderful, relaxing way to introduce your children to the finer things in life.