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History of Classical Music from Beautiful Feet Books
I’m excited to bring you my first curriculum review from one of my favorite publishers, Beautiful Feet Books. I mentioned in this post that we incorporate enrichment subjects through our weekly poetry tea times. Today I’m sharing with you the resource we use for our music study portion of PTT, History of Classical Music.
About Beautiful Feet Books
Beautiful Feet Books is a homeschool curriculum publisher specializing in history through literature. They incorporate a Charlotte Mason homeschool style into their beautiful literature packs. Beautiful Feet Books offers a variety of levels and time periods for history, as well as geography and character through literature courses.
History of Classical Music
History of Classical Music is a unique approach to music appreciation, incorporating beautiful literature books and historical timeline to teach the History of Classical Music from the Baroque era to the Modern Era. Learn about the faith and lives that inspired the works and music of so many great composers. History of classical music covers the evolution of the orchestra and how musical compositions changed over time. The recommended age for this study is intermediate (4th-8th), but I think it could be adjusted up or down depending on the student.
Purchasing Options
Beautiful Feet Books offers the option to purchase the all-inclusive jumbo pack, or individual resources. I purchased the jumbo pack as I prefer to have all of the resources ready and available to me. If you aren’t ready to fully dive into this study right away, you can purchase the guide to get you started and add resources when you are ready.
If you already own a few of the books, Beautiful Feet allows you to have those already owned resources removed from the package, while still being able to purchase at the discounted package price. This is the only publisher I know of that offers this option. I utilized this service myself when I purchased the package, and Beautiful Feet Books’ customer service was excellent and made it an easy process. Beautiful Feet has made this even easier by allowing you to customize the pack online, so you don’t even need to pick up the phone. I highly recommend utilizing this simple option if you already own a few of the titles in this package.
What’s Included?
When you purchase the History of Classical Music Jumbo Pack the following items are included.
Teacher Guide
This full color, 34 page guide contains 75 flexible lessons. Keep in mind, this is a guide not a manual and provides the ultimate flexibility. You can easily pick and choose or rearrange lessons. The guide contains suggested notebooking and timeline activities, along with suggested websites to give you the opportunity to dig deeper. There are questions in some lessons that can be used as notebooking prompts or to check comprehension, with an answer key in the back of the guide. The lessons are short and not overwhelming, and you can easily combine lessons if you want to speed up the pace of this study.
Beautiful Feet recommends completing two to three lessons a week to make this a one year study.
Timeline
The timeline kit contains a heavy cardstock foldable timeline that can be placed on a wall or in a notebook. The composer pictures are beautifully outlined drawings that your child can color or leave black and white. Each timeline figure piece contains the name as well as the dates of birth and death of each composer. We purchased an extra timeline set so each of the boys can have their own. If you plan to keep your timeline in a notebook, I suggest getting one for each child.
The Books
There are several beautiful literature selections included in this study.
A Child’s Introduction to the Orchestra (This is a favorite in my house)
Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers
Paganini: Master of Strings
Musical Genius
Coloring Book of Great Composers:
Coloring Book of Great Composers
Dance Me a Story
How to Grow a Young Music Lover
The Extras
Composers Card Game
Music Masters 18 CD Collection
There is a free picture packet you can download from Beautiful Feet Books to include in your notebooks.
How we use The History of Classical Music
History of Classical Music is a great addition to our weekly poetry tea time. I read the selections aloud while the boys color their timeline pieces or eat cookies. On average, we complete one lesson a week, sometimes combining shorter lessons to complete two. At this pace, we plan to complete this study over two years. Since we use this strictly for enrichment and not as our main history course, we only do a few of the notebooking activities. We use these kraft notebooks from Amazon to keep a record of the composers of each era, as well as their birthplaces, and any facts
that stood out to the boys. Their timelines are stapled to the back page of the notebooks so they can unfold them to add new composers, then fold them back into the books so they are nicely contained.
What We Like
The boys love learning about the composers and their lives while eating cookies. They enjoy interacting with the composers through the timeline activity and like having the visual to help them keep track of who was in what era. I like that the lessons are short and flexible and drama-free. My boys are gaining knowledge about a topic area that doesn’t get much emphasis in education anymore. I think it’s important to provide my kids with cultural experience and context, and music and other fine arts were an extremely important part of certain historical eras. I love that this study is so easy to implement that I literally just open the guide and do the next lesson without any advanced prep. The flexibility of this study serves us well, and if we miss a lesson due to a busy week, we can just open up the guide and pick up where we left off. I am a big fan of easy to implement resources and this definitely fits that criteria.
Do I Recommend The History of Classical Music?
This is most definitely a resounding yes! We have enjoyed several studies from Beautiful Feet Books and History of Classical Music does not disappoint. The History of Classical music is a great addition to our Poetry Tea Time and provides us with just enough structure to feel like we are getting an excellent music appreciation study, while not being overly structured to the point of being burdensome. If you want to give your kids an educational feast, this is definitely an enriching study to incorporate into your homeschool.