Guggenheim Museum

A piece by Kandinski

We met up with the homeschool group again this week for a trip to the Guggenheim Museum.  Here's another museum I've always meant to get to, but never did.  We had about a dozen kids, all  about 10-12 y/o.  Our tour guide was friendly and fun and first sat with the kids right on the floor of the main lobby to talk about the structure of the building.  It's a strangely shaped place created by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943. They talked about aesthetics, sounds, history, and architecture.  Our first stop on the tour was to a gallery of artwork by Vasily Kandinski, who created these geometric collages stemming from his synesthesia (music and letters are perceived with colors).  They had discussions about the artwork and we found out that the whole museum was created to house Kandinski's art.  We walked to the top of the spiraled building and passed by many pieces from John Chamberlain.  His art was mainly from crushed and battered cars.  He used all parts of the car except the glass and the tires.

Talking about Chamberlain's sculpture

A sculpture on the main floor

The final part of the class was in the computer lab in the museum's lower level.  We had a new instructor who showed the kids how to use a program called Sketch-Up.  It's a cool 3D design program from Google.  The kids all had their own computers to work with and started with a basic x- and y-axis.  They created rectangles and triangles and then 3-dimensional shapes.  It was fun and W will probably download the program at home.

Using Sketch-Up

The remainder of the afternoon was spent in Central Park.  We got some quick cart food and headed over to the pyramid playground by the Met Museum.  The park was packed with kids and W had a blast forming a huge game of manhunt with the homeschool kids and about 8-10 other boys from the park.  It was so beautiful out and we could have stayed there all day.  


W's interest in singing has recently resurfaced.  He remembered how much he enjoyed being in that kids musical a few summers ago and seems to want to pursue that further.  So, I found him a youth show choir that meets on Saturday afternoons and he started today.  This 12-week session's theme is jazz and so far they're working on singing and dancing to "Take the A-Train" and "It Don't Mean a Thing".  He absolutely loved it and cannot wait to get back there next week.  


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Academics this week:

English: Spelling (20 new words, definitions and classification), Sentence construction, Mini-Test (vocabulary, pronouns, punctuation, sentence construction, using interrogative & exclamatory sentences), Collecting data from various references to write an essay, bibliographies, using a dictionary (guide words, pronunciation guide, syllables)

Math: Area of right triangles, squares, & rectangles, Mini-test (graphing coordinates, area, 3D shapes, metric measurement, congruence), gathering & communicating data (charts & bar graphs), finding the mean

History: American Revolution: Loyalists & Patriots