14: 7 Top Reasons Fine Arts in Your Homeschool is an Absolute Must Plus How To Do It! part 1

Welcome to Part 1 of Episode 14 of the Music in Our Homeschool podcast! In this episode, Gena Mayo dives into why incorporating fine arts into your homeschool is an absolute must. Discover how you can include fine arts effortlessly and affordably, even if you lack formal training in music, art, dance, or theater. Gena, a seasoned homeschooling mom and music teacher with over 30 years of experience, provides valuable insights into defining fine arts, understanding fine arts credits for homeschooled high school students, and logging hours for homeschool high school fine arts classes. Explore Bloom's Taxonomy and discover a variety of engaging activities to enrich your fine arts curriculum. Stay tuned for Part 2 next week, where Gena will reveal the seven compelling reasons every student should study fine arts and share practical tips for incorporating fine arts into your homeschool, regardless of your background. Keep the music alive and join us for an inspiring journey into the world of fine arts! Find all links and resources for this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/fine-arts-in-your-homeschool

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Transcript

7 Top Reasons Fine Arts in Your Homeschool is an Absolute Must Plus How To Do It! (E14) part 1

[00:00:00] Today we'll be talking about the seven top reasons fine arts in your homeschool is an absolute must. Plus, how you can include fine arts inexpensively and effortlessly, even if you personally have no talent or training in music, art, dance, or theater. We will learn what fine arts entails, what a fine arts credit is for homeschooled high school students. 

I thought I'd start with an introduction for those of you who aren't familiar with me. My name is Gena Mayo and I've been married for over 25 years.

I have eight children who are the ages of 23 down to 11, four have graduated high school, and two of those have graduated college and are successfully working now. This year I homeschooled my last four kids who are in middle and high school, and have always homeschooled all my kids all the way through, except for my oldest who did his last three years of high school at a public school.

I'm [00:01:00] also a music teacher. After earning a Bachelor's of Music Education degree from Baylor University, I received a Master's degree in Music in Vocal Pedagogy, which is how to teach voice lessons, and an Early Childhood Music and Movement Certification from Musikgarten. I taught for five years in the public school system, junior high choir, and elementary general music, before I had my first child.

After becoming a mom, I taught Musikgarten Mommy and Me classes out of my home and eventually at our homeschool co op, and other music education classes such as private and group voice lessons, musical theater classes, and music appreciation classes. One of my favorite ways to teach music is as a musical director for full length musicals, which I've done every year for the past eight years.

I began the website MusicinOurHomeschool.com as a way to encourage and equip homeschoolers to include music in their [00:02:00] homeschool. My online course site Learn.MusicinOurHomeschool.com provides super easy to use, click-and-go music lessons for students of all ages, preschool through adult.

There's even a free sampler course with 25 free lessons there if you'd like to try out some of the lessons at MusicinOurHomeschool.com/Sampler Let's start out by defining what a fine arts credit is. Fine arts is a type of elective class a student takes in elementary, middle, or high school.

Fine Arts, as defined by ArtEducators. org, is the following: "The Performing and Visual Arts, generally referred to as the Fine Arts, are unique and important in the school curriculum. For purposes of developing this curricular area, we define the Fine Arts as consisting of Visual Arts, dance, music, and theater.

Although [00:03:00] certain of the language arts may fall within a broad definition of art, they receive sufficient attention in the school curriculum through their inclusion in language courses. All other courses such as practical arts that include the word art in their titles serve different educational purposes, and they should not be considered as part of the fine arts."

Well, that's certainly one way to look at it, but many others in the education realm have differing definitions. I will, at this point, encourage you to research your own state's or country's individual laws regarding yearly curriculum per grade level and graduation requirements. Some states require fine arts and have a specific definition of what to include.

Others don't. so you have more freedom on how you will create your fine arts class for your student. I love that homeschool fine arts can cover such [00:04:00] a wide variety of disciplines.

This means that if you have a student who may really be averse to some of these that I'm about to list, he or she may be very excited about others, because I think fine arts can include art lessons, voice lessons, piano, guitar, or any other instrument lessons, church praise band, or vocal group, choir, band, orchestra, music ensembles such as a barbershop quartet, jazz ensemble, string quartet, or garage band, any dance lessons such as ballet, jazz, tap, ballroom, Irish, or praise dance, drama productions, drama camp, filmmaking, playing in or attending classical music concerts, attending ballets, operas, plays, or musicals, Visiting art museums, art galleries, and local art fairs.

Music theory class, music appreciation, or music history class. [00:05:00] art appreciation or art history class, music recording and producing, virtual choir or virtual music ensemble participation, photography, drawing, painting, pottery, leatherworking, jewelry making, ceramics, printmaking, and sculpting, reading about and studying artists, composers, musicians, dancers, and actors, video production, script writing, play writing, or screenwriting, audio editing, poetry study, and poetry recitation, 3d design, graphic art.

Animation, songwriting and music composition, acting and pantomime, musical theater class and performance, technical theater and stagecraft, improvisation in theater, dance or music, puppetry, fashion design including costume history, textile and fiber arts, [00:06:00] architecture history and design. So you've probably noticed that I included way more disciplines and ideas in this list than the previous definition that just included visual arts, dance, music, and theater.

Let's take a minute to focus in on high school specifically, and we'll return to the younger grades in a bit. When you are determining credits in your homeschool high school, it's important not to count a class twice. For example, you'll have to decide if your daughter's ballet class will be your fine arts credit or your physical education credit.

You can't count it for both. Another example is, Is your poetry study going to be part of your fine arts credit or English literature credit? Furthermore, decide if you are counting this activity as an elective or an extracurricular activity. Again, it can't be both. For example, you might want to list praise [00:07:00] band at church as an extracurricular activity on their high school transcript instead of as part of a class.

You get to decide. The elective class will earn them a grade and will be included in the total number of credits the student eventually earns for high school. An extracurricular activity, on the other hand, is something that is listed separately to help define the student's well roundedness. It's where you would list things like job experience, internships, volunteer activities, and leadership positions.

And yes, it is allowed that the same activity such as performing in musicals or praise band can be counted as an elective one year, and then the next year they do it again, it could be counted as an extracurricular activity.

A full credit course in high school contains 120 to 180 hours of work, and a half credit course contains 60 to [00:08:00] 90 hours. Why isn't there an exact number of hours? Well, that would just make it too easy for us, right? To research hours of a high school class further, do a search on the phrase Carnegie unit.

Personally, I tend to push for the upper level of hours for my own students since I think of classes this way. A school year in the United States is typically thought of as 36 weeks long. Students go to school five days a week and are in a high school class about an hour a day. So five hours times 36 weeks equals 180 hours.

However, we also know that that's the absolute maximum time a class entails. Rarely do public school or private school students actually do a full hour per class for all five days a week for a full 36 weeks during a school year. And that's why you can choose to go [00:09:00] lower when counting up the hours for your homeschool high school class.

If you're creating your own class, log the hours you work on it and keep it as "proof." If your class is from a high school level textbook, or a high school level online course, or a high school level in-person class, you generally don't need to log hours unless you're using that class as only part of your full fine arts credit.

For example, one year my son took a singing class that met for two hours a week for 20 weeks. He was also taking private voice lessons and practicing a lot at home. So I was able to add that outside class to his voice lessons and his at-home practice to equal a full fine arts credit for the year. Next, let's talk about how to log hours for your homeschool high school fine arts class.

Logging hours is very simple to do. The student just needs to pick a [00:10:00] method, stick to it, and write down every single time they work on the class. Here are a few ideas of where to log their hours. A spreadsheet app on their phone, a spreadsheet on the computer, a spiral notebook, or a student homeschool planners often have a place in them to track hours spent on a class as well.

What should the student do during their fine arts class and what should they include when they are logging hours? Have you ever heard of Bloom's Taxonomy? It's a classification system that expresses and explains different levels or categories of human cognition. There are six levels of thinking skills that increase from lower order to higher order.

The Bloom's Taxonomy levels are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. So here's a few verbs that go with each of these levels and can give you some ideas of what your [00:11:00] student can be doing. For knowledge: arrange, describe, identify, match, memorize. For comprehension: classify, discuss, give examples, rewrite, summarize.

For application: Demonstrate, Dramatize, Illustrate, Practice, and Use. For Analysis, Categorize, Compare, Contrast, Experiment, Model. For Synthesis, Assemble, Design, Rearrange, Reconstruct. For Evaluation: argue, explain, judge, justify, support. Do a search for Bloom's Taxonomy verbs to get more information about this.

So using Bloom's Taxonomy, you can come up with a list of activities for your homeschool high school fine arts course like this. [00:12:00] Read a music appreciation book, such as a music history or art appreciation book, along with your course to learn even more about the styles of the composers or artists. Teach or narrate what you have learned to a parent, sibling, or friend.

Read or recite a poem out loud. Film yourself dramatizing it. Memorize it. Write a five paragraph essay, a compare and contrast essay, or a descriptive essay every week based on the lessons studied. Write a research paper based on a topic studied in your course. Compose a poem based on the style or form you studied in the course.

Give a speech using one of the essays or your research paper as a basis. Include a multimedia presentation such as with Google Slides, or make an animation video or a photo slideshow to teach others what you have just learned. Go [00:13:00] to a concert, a recital, an opera, or a musical to hear one of the composers or pieces studied in the course.

Learn to play or sing or act or dance something you just studied. Explore an art museum or an art gallery to see art, hopefully filled with one of the artists that you just studied. Compose a musical piece, create a piece of art, or choreograph a dance based on the style you studied in the course. That's just a list to get you started.

There are so many more things you could do. We are going to stop right here and come back next week to finish up talking about the seven top reasons fine arts in your homeschool is an absolute must and how to do it. So next week we will talk about the seven reasons why every student should study fine arts and we'll wrap up with how you can include it even if you have no formal training in fine arts [00:14:00] yourself.

So I hope it's been helpful today for you to learn what fine arts entails and what a fine arts credit is for your homeschool high school students. See you next week and until then keep the music alive.

Find all links and resources for this episode here: https://MusicinOurHomeschool.com/fine-arts-in-your-homeschool