Thursday, July 23, 2015

"I Went to the Woods..."



In our most recent homeschool History, Religion, and Culture studies, we have been studying the American Transcendentalists. Highlights have included reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden and then visiting the site of his cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, MA. We also visited Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Louisa May Alcott's house on the same "Transcendentalist" trip! (see photos below).

Here are a list of books and essays we read and documentaries and films we watched:

Henry David Thoreau, Walden
John Porcellino, Thoreau at Walden (an excellent graphic novel)
D.B. Johnson, Henry Builds a Cabin
D.B. Johnson, Henry Hikes to Fitchburg
D.B. Johnson, Henry's Night
D.B. Johnson, Henry Climbs a Mountain
D.B. Johnson, Henry Works

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles"
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Over Soul"
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Louisa May Alcott, "Transcendental Wild Oats"

Elizabeth Peabody and Amos Bronson Alcott, "A Controversial Experiment in Progressive Education"
Margaret Fuller, "The Great Lawsuit"
George Ripley, "Brook Farm's Consitution"

Movies and documentaries:

Little Women (dir. Gillian Armstrong, 1994)
The Woman Behind Little Women (PBS, 2009)
Emerson: The Ideal in America (dir. David Beardsley, 2007)


Photos from our Transcendentalist tour of Concord, MA

Me and Emeron...






In Walden's cabin (or at least, inside a reproduction of his cabin!)


Emerson's study...

Rumi came for the Transcendentalist trip!


Inside Bronson Alcott's study at Fruitlands, the utopian community he founded and where he lived with his wife and kids, including Louisa May


Our pictures of Fruitlands!


Wednesday, July 1, 2015

The Best of all Possible Operas


I was just in a really great production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide with my Grandad, GG, and my mum. All three of us sung in the chorus, and I also played a pirate and a king. We performed the operetta at St John's Episcopal Church in Yonkers, NY. The music was pretty complex and we had to learn how to sing in harmony, which was a first for me! Here is an article that Jojo wrote about the production at the Huffington Post.

Thank you to Katherine Bourbeau for the photos.