I'm wondering if there are any books or any suggestion from you all about teaching art/music for a 9th grader. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks.
Art I would check out Artistic Pursuits. They have a nice program. As for music you could use A Young Scholars Guide to Composers. It says it is for 4-8 but you could easily do it for 9th.
For art, we explored working with dozens of different media and techniques. Very hands on. Painting, Drawing, Ceramics, Sculpting...we tried all sorts of different things. There are a million books and videos at the library with equipment lists and techniques. We have a community art center that offers classes. Elle loved the art center, and ended up volunteering to paint murals around town on buildings and underpasses. We are a HUGE art household. We did everything from making and decorating plaster masks, to building our own ceramics wheel and kiln out of junkyard parts, to oil pastels, to sewing elaborate costumes. Tons of painting and drawing techniques, and TONS of art play. One of my favorite memories is building a mastodon in our yard out of driftwood we found in the river with canoes! Had some friends over, and the boys had chainsaws for helping with the big stuff, but my best girlfriend and I designed this massive skeleton of an ancient elephant. Was almost 15 feet tall. We had ladders out there, and were setting pieces with a pulley up in a tree. Was an amazing undertaking....but it looked just incredible when it was done. We planted English Ivy on it, and it lasted for years. The year it crumbled down, we had a huge bone bonfire with the same friends. Wonderful memory. We keep talking about doing dinosaurs in our front field. That would be a MUCH bigger undertaking....but so cool!
Melissa, recommendations would depend on whether you want to DO art and music, or APPRECIATE art and music. What did you have in mind?
For music appreciation, I've enjoyed the World's Greatest Composers curriculum. It's also reasonably priced. http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/2012/01/worlds-greatest-composers-vol-1.html
Our family is pretty much immersed in the arts. We use a lot of resources. I have never found an all-inclusive curriculum that I have liked. I tend to teach music as we go, using various tools to do so. Art is overseen by my mother (long-distance via computer and in person when she visits). Again, she uses different tools, but we don't have a good curriculum. If you would like resource recomendations, I can help with that. Unless you're looking more towards history/appreciation. That's a different story!
