TOS review: A Young Scholar's Guide to Composers

Precise Prince enjoys classical music.  As a matter of fact, when we were boxing up some items in anticipation of selling our house, my husband's classical music CD's were accidentally packed.  We ended up going into storage and opening up a couple of boxes to find them and bring them back out.

So when I was given the chance to choose one item to review from Bright Ideas Press from a list of items, I decided A Young Scholar's Guide to Composers would be a good fit for us. 

This 298 page book is divided into 32 lessons.  Taking one lesson per week would get you through this book in one school year.  The majority of the lessons are about specific composers.  There are a few lessons giving a short overview of the different time periods of music as well.

The introduction gives you an outline of how to use the Composers book.  I want to mention here that I loved that this book starts off writing that music is from the Lord! Here's how we have incorporated the Composers study into our homeschool-using most of the suggestions in the introduction.

On day one, we listen to the recommended selections.  You can use the appendix in the book for websites that have the suggested music suggestions or if you have a husband like mine or if you have a collection yourself, you may find you own CD's with the suggested musical selections on them.

I love that the intro to this book recognizes that some kids will want to color, dance or move.  There are coloring pages at the back of the book you can print out for the kids to color while listening to the music.  My kids usually draw while listening.

After listening to the selection, I read the biography on the composer.  I gave the kids each their own copy of the note taking pages and we filled them out together as I read.  I may change this in the future and use the note taking pages at the end of reading to see how well they were listening.  That ends day one.

On the second day of our weekly lesson, we listen to the recommended selections again.  Then we fill out the Composer Info-Card.  These are 5x7 cards with the name of the composer, his musical period and a picture of him on the front of the card.  The back of the card has some basic info on the composer that the kids fill in including when he lived, a small map to color in the country where he was born or where he did most of his composing, 3 facts about the composer, two compositions he wrote and whether or not we know he was a Christian.

Next we color in the timeline and put the composer card into our folderbook.  A folderbook is similar to a lapbook but a bit quicker to put together.  I found the instructions for the folderbook a bit confusing.  But by looking at the pictures in the book and reading what a folderbook was, I was able to make one for each of the kids that works well for us.  You do not have to make a folderbook-this is simply one of a few ways Bright Ideas Press gave to help your children remember what you are reading.

Day three is listening to the selection and reviewing what we have learned. 

I want to mention that there are a couple of games you can print out to play with your kids-composer bingo and composer Jeopardy.  These would be good for review once you've spent a few months studying this book.  In addition the introduction has a map activity that you can use to add a geography component for studying the composers.  We chose not to use this component but I love that it is an option. 

I think this book is a great introduction to the Composers.  If you find that your child really enjoys certain composers, you can stop and study that composer for awhile before moving on to the next lesson and take more than one school year to get through this book.  There is a Resource List at the end of the book to help you delve deeper into some of the studies if you choose this option. 

This book is recommended for grades 4-8 but can easily be adapted for younger and older grades, in my opinion.  Older children could easily do this study on their own.  Actually, I could probably have both my third and fifth grader do the reading on their own and fill out the note taking pages and composer cards without me.  However, I just prefer this type of study to be done together.

The Composers study comes in CD format or as a regular bound softcover book.  I chose the book because when I'm reading to the kids, I prefer reading from a book than from the computer.  However, there are many things meant for printing out (note taking pages, coloring pages, Composer cards, map elements, etc.) so a CD format would be a great choice too.  Since our printer also copies, I just copied what we needed.  I also took the book to a local copy center and had it spiral bound.  (It is much easier to copy from a spiral bound book.)  Yes, you will use a fair amount of ink and paper if you copy (or print out from the CD) every resource available in this book.  However, you can pick and choose which resources to use and minimize the ink usage. 

Bottom line: I recommend this book as a great introduction to Composers and I plan to continue to use A Young Scholar's Guide to Composers in our homeschooling.  I will probably do one lesson every other week simply because we have so much in our regular schooling already but this book lends itself well for this. 

The cost for the Composers book is $34.95.  The CD-Rom version is only $29.95. 

See what my fellow crewmates had to say about this book and other resources from Bright Ideas Press here.

(I received A Young Scholar's Guide to Composers for free in exchange for my honest opinion.  No other compensation was received.)