Orpheus in the Underworld

Side Dishes

Regarding our Stories & Studies program –  If books are the “main course”, we need side dishes to complete the nightly academic banquet.  This is the fun part for me – making up the story problems, word scrambles, iPad keyboard practice words, and most fun of all, creating the reading comprehension sheets.

Reading Comprehension –
Our reading comprehension efforts amount to this:  in complete silence, my son reads a few paragraphs dealing with the antics of two best friends, Clem and Clyde, and answers questions so I can assess if he understood what he read.  So far, it is a big smiles occasion when I present a new “Clem and Clyde”  and my son has worked through 25 reading comp sheets.  Did I hear someone inquire about the page titles?  OK:

Clem and Clyde get Jobs!
Clem and Clyde get New Shoes
Clem and Clyde and the Dandy Potato!*
Clem and Clyde Win an Award!
Clem and Clyde and the Pizza Poet
Clem and Clyde and the Purring Promenade
Clem and Clyde Learn to Juggle!
Clem and Clyde get New Backpacks
Clem and Clyde Paint their Bedrooms
Clem and Clyde Drive Tractors!*
Clem and Clyde and Honest Abe
Clem and Clyde and the Dream Destination
Clem and Clyde:  Trampoline Testers!
Clem and Clyde at Home on Candy Cane Lane
Clem and Clyde make New Years Resolutions
Clem and Clyde buy a Snowman
Clem and Clyde try Sugar Snap Peas
Clem and Clyde take Square Dancing Lessons!
Clem and Clyde get Haircuts
Clem and Clyde get Saturday Jobs
Clem and Clyde Paint Murals
Clem and Clyde and the Band-Aid Stand
Clem and Clyde Host a Spaghetti Dinner
Clem and Clyde Help Out at the Library
Clem and Clyde Make the Worst Lemonade

*samples:

iPad Keyboard Competence –
My son still needs to get comfortable with letter positions on a keyboard.   Repetition is obviously the key, but here is what would happen if I said “press the “a”, press the “a”, press the “a”, now press the “b”, press the “b”, press the “b””:  NOTHING.  So, I prepare groups of rhyming words (one group per night) (enough is enough) (this seems to be SLOWLY working:  without assistance, my son can now locate and press letters “A” through “I”).   Rhyming clusters like these:

wink – blink – sink – pink – rink – think (repeatedly pressing the “i-n-k” letters)
bark – park – hark – lark – shark – mark (repeatedly pressing the “a-r-k” letters)

Word Scrambles – 
My son LOVES (and is lightning fast at) unscrambling words.  If nothing else, this is good for  handwriting practice.  Not that anyone needs an example, but:

THARRSOCE (orchestra)
SLYMOPIC (Olympics)

Story Problems
I like story problems and I like writing them.  When I was a youngster, story problems were the only way that I could understand the point of math. Our story problems bring to life the Local Diner or Farmer Brown’s Ranch and Roadside Stand.

~The local diner has decided to bottle and sell their popular spicy buttermilk salad dressing.  Local high school art students are competing to design the bottle’s label.   The prize is three-pronged: 1) a case of 24 bottles of the spicy buttermilk salad dressing, 2) photo of winning designer in local newspaper, 3) the photo enlarged to poster size and displayed near the diner cash register (we are talking HOME TOWN FAME).  

– If each bottle will sell in the diner for $5.00, how much is the prize worth? 
a)  $24     b)  $120     c)  $500     d)  $524

– If the “sell by” date of each bottle is 6 months after bottling, and a family typically goes through 2 bottles of salad dressing a month, how many bottles from the case of 24 should the prize winner give away to neighbors?
a)  9     b)  12     c)  18     d)  20 (answers at bottom of post)

~Farmer Brown has recently purchased 5 new umbrellas for the outdoor picnic area adjacent to his roadside produce stand.  Good grief, each umbrella cost $500!  Farmer Brown is selling his popular “cinnamon stick apple pies” for $20 each to raise money to pay for the umbrellas.  If the profit from each pie sold is $15, will Farmer Brown have to sell more or less than 150 apple pies? (answer at bottom of post)

Parlez-vous de musique classique?  For the duration of the Paris Olympics, we have listened to the work of French composers (Saint-Saëns, Ravel, Faure, Satie, Offenbach, Delibes, Bizet, Debussy) every single night.   Getting us into the Parisian spirit – 

(BTW, this is how my son selects music every night)

Offenbach – The Can-Can from Jacque Offenbach’s comic opera of 1874, “Orpheus in the Underworld”.  This is the lively version my son and I have listened to many, many, many times –

Bizet – The Carillon (tower bells) from “L’Arlesienne, Suite No. 1”, composed in 1872.  Bizet composed 27 pieces  of incidental music for Alphonse Daudet’s drama (“L’Arlesienne”).  In this performance, we like how the conductor moves this piece right along.  The usual tempo is a bit slower.

Debussy – Clair de Lune, inspired by Paul Verlaine’s poem (1869),  Clair de Lune is the 3rd movement of Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque” composition for piano of 1890.  This video footage complete with Lang Lang’s achingly slow, thought-filled performance, is filled with current scenes of Paris.  Perfect! 

Welcome to the best part of my day!
– Jane BH
(story problem answers:  b)  $120, b)  12 bottles to neighbors, and “more” (Farmer Brown needs to sell 167 apple pies)

The Liberace Instigation

liberace

This post is not about the man, Liberace, but about a GLARING ERROR he made before treating the TV audience to his take on the classic Strauss “Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz”.  See for yourself:

You saw the problem, right?

Of course, I am referring to the introductory comment: “…I would like to take you back…many hundreds of years ago to that wonderful, romantic night when Johann Strauss first introduced the waltz…”.  Here is the GLARING ERROR:  Johann Strauss II premiered “The Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz” in 1867, just 86 years (NOT many hundreds of years) prior to Liberace’s 1953 TV show.

I sort of want my son to have a more accurate sense of when important musical compositions were written, so I have put together a simple chart of classical pieces that he is familiar with, and paired them with US Presidential administrations. This will give us both a bit of a sense of what was going on in the world when each piece was written, and remind us that many great compositions are not as old as we think (or Liberace thought)(seriously, I suspect a lot of people think classical music was written 500 years ago, in a galaxy far, far away).

The chart works this way:

USA Presidential Administration – 1 orchestral piece composed or premiered during that time period

George Washington  –  Haydn’s “Symphony No. 94” (Surprise Symphony), 1791
John Adams  –  Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata No. 14” (Moonlight Sonata), 1801
Thomas Jefferson  –  Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5”, 1808
James Madison  –  Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville”, 1816
James Monroe  –  Schubert’s “Marche Militaire”, 1822
John Quincy Adams  –  Rossini’s “William Tell Overture”, 1829
Andrew Jackson  –  Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides Overture”, 1830
Martin Van Buren  –  Chopin’s “Piano Sonata No. 2” (The Funeral March), 1837
William Henry Harrison  –  Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman”, 1841
John Tyler  –  Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March”, 1842
James Polk  –  Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2”, 1847
Zachery Taylor  –  Schumann’s “Symphony No. 3” (The Rhenish), 1850
Millard Fillmore  –  Verdi’s “Rigoletto”, 1851
Franklin Pierce  –  Foster’s “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”, 1854
James Buchanan  –  Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” (the Can-Can!), 1858
Abraham Lincoln  –  Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, 1862
Andrew Johnson –  Strauss II’s “Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz”, 1867
Ulysses S. Grant  –  Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite”, 1876
Rutherford B. Hayes  –  Gilbert & Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore”, 1878
James Garfield  –  Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy”, 1881
Chester A. Arthur  –  Waldteufel’s “The Skater’s Waltz”, 1882
Grover Cleveland  –  Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals”, 1886
Benjamin Harrison  –  Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker”, 1892
Grover Cleveland  –  Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, 1897
William McKinley  –  Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”, 1900
Teddy Roosevelt  –  Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance, No. 1”, 1901
William H. Taft  –  Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”, 1913
Woodrow Wilson  –  Holst’s “The Planets”, 1916
Warren G. Harding  –  Berlin’s “What’ll I Do”, 1923
Calvin Coolidge  –  Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, 1924
Herbert Hoover  –  Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite”, 1931
Franklin D. Roosevelt  –  Copland’s “Appalachian Spring”, 1944
Harry S Truman  –  Anderson’s “The Typewriter”, 1950
Dwight Eisenhower – Bernstein’s “West Side Story”, 1957
John F. Kennedy  –  Mancini’s “The Pink Panther Theme”, 1963
Lyndon Johnson  –  The Beatles’ “Yesterday”, 1965
Richard Nixon  –  Weissberg/Mandell’s “Dueling Banjos”, 1973
Gerald Ford  –  Williams’ “Theme from Jaws”, 1975
Jimmy Carter  –  Williams’ “The Imperial March” (Darth Vader’s Theme), 1980
Ronald Reagan  –  Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera”, 1986
George H.W. Bush  –  George Winston’s “Hummingbird”, 1991
Bill Clinton  –  Doyle’s “Steam Engine” (from “Sense and Sensibility”), 1995
George W. Bush  –  Kirkhope’s “Viva Piñata Soundtrack”, 2006
Barack Obama  –  Williams’ “The Adventures of Tintin”, 2011

(and yes!  My son is quite familiar with all of the above pieces.)

jacques c      otto

BTW, this week we have been ALSO learning about Jacques Cousteau and Otto Von Bismarck.

Welcome to the best part of my day!
– Jane BH