One of our members did an original composer study, taking the lead from her son’s love of gaming. We want to share it with you to use as a model for your own, or merely as inspiration. Here is her description:
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So, here’s the background of this ‘study’ that my son and I worked on. One day, he was listening to a YouTube playlist as he was building Lego. It was a playlist of songs from various video game soundtracks – and one track came on and I felt like I knew it, but I don’t know game soundtracks at all so I listened from outside the room trying to place this song. Then it hit me – it sounded like Clint Mansell who is one of my ALL TIME favourite musician/composers. He’s brilliant. Anyway so I went in to my son’s room and checked out the title of the track and sure enough it was Mansell, and I noticed it was a piece from a game called Mass Effect 3.
I told Evan, “You know who this IS?? This is my favourite composer of maybe EVER.” And I started to show him a few of Mansell’s tracks on YouTube. So Evan says, “We should do him as our music study like we do our artist studies.”
So, the deal was that I wanted Evan to ‘lead’ the composer study. He would choose one track from Mansell for the three of us to listen to once a week, and he’d tell me why he chose the track. I also made up 6 questions to ‘guide’ him in how to research the composer (I know this is not strictly CM but he was not sure how to go about researching, so I thought this would be a fun way for him to do that). Each week, at composer study time – Evan would play the song, and he’d ‘teach us’ about whatever the question was for that week.
We.LOVED.it.
Marjorie Lang is co-creator of Wildwood Curriculum, and passionate about making a Charlotte Mason education available to everyone.
She blogs at: https://juniperpines.com
Thanks for sharing this fun idea! This might be a great way to engage my 13 year old, who is less than enthusiastic about school. We’re new to CM, but for me the goal isn’t to be a purist, but rather to inspire a love of learning. So the video game idea seems to be a great way to meet a child where he’s at!