Saint-Saens

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)

2016 – Gone, but not forgotten

2016-quiz

2016:  the year we learned more about –  the California Gold Rush, the insanely brilliant architecture of Gaudi, the work of bees, Eugene Bullard, homonyms, Hannibal, dwarf planets, George Washington Carver, patents, rodents, Rube Goldberg, computation involving triangles, etc, etc, etc.  Last night, my son took matching quiz that reviewed our academic studies from the past year, and earned an A+.  Good year.

macaulay-book

New book!  For Christmas, a special aunt and uncle sent my son David Macaulay’s classic, “The Way Things Work”.  This is obviously a mechanical engineering book lurking behind precise illustrations and hilarious examples.  This past week, we became experts on “the inclined plane” and “the lever”.  (In 2016, we learned a lot from Macauley’s books on “The Toilet” and “The Mill”, so we should emerge MENSA-worthy if we can absorb everything this comprehensive book offers.)

electricity

Story Problem from Le Fictitious Local Diner – The diner spent a lot of money on electricity in 2016; management is reviewing usage to see if they can cut back (perhaps a weekly “dining by candle-light” event might make a teeny dent in the diner’s electrical consumption).  To make decisions, management needs some facts:  if the diner was open 6 days a week, how many days in 2016 were they using electricity?  If the cooks were at the diner from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m., how many hours last year was the diner using electricity? (story problem answers at bottom of post)

2016

Music Listening in 2016 – My son and I welcomed an additional 85 classical (in the broadest sense) pieces into our iPod library this past year.  Last night, I presented a list of our fave 10 of these compositions and then my son picked his top three for listening.

10 pieces we first listened to in 2016 –

Ave Maria – Arcadelt
Banjoland Buffoonery – Kirkhope
Brandenberg Concerto No. 3 – Bach
Harp Concerto in A major – Dittersdorf
Organ Symphony, finale – Saint-Saens
Persian March – Strauss
Sailing By – Binge
String Quartet No. 2, scherzo – Borodin
The Anvil Chorus (Il Trovatore) – Verdi
Toccata in A major – Paradisi

music-faves-2016

My son’s selections for last night’s listening –

– “Banjoland Buffoonery”, composed in 1998 by Grant Kirkhope for the Nintendo 64 video game, “Banjo-Kazooie”.  A short piece, packed with rollicking fun, AND an excellent (and accessible for the likes of my son and myself) example of theme and variation:

– “Persian March”, composed by Johann Strauss II, in 1864.   My son cannot stop his toes from tapping to this marvelously exotic march (expertly played by a Polish youth orchestra) (SO heartening to witness excellence in youth):

– “Sailing By”, written by Ronald Binge in 1963 and used by BBC Radio to introduce the late shipping forecast.  This sweet,  slumberous waltz gets our vote for most soothing lullaby.  When we just cannot deal with one more thing, THIS is our music:

Welcome to the best part of my day!
– Jane BH
(story problem answers: 1) 312 days 2) 5,304 hours)

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

A Fanfare for the Water Bear

water bear

Water Bears? Last night we finished “Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space” but not before this wonderful book tantalized us with a few facts about water bears. Do you know about water bears?  Water bears look like cousins of those icky dust mites that mattress companies use to scare you into purchasing a new bed. I have included a link (about water bears, not mattress critters) so you can see for yourselves. Interesting and borderline gross.  Two thumbs up from my son.

Here is why astro-scientists want to know about water bears: they are the hardiest organisms on earth. They can live in extreme temps (-300 degrees F to +300 degrees F), they are unfazed by high pressure, low pressure, or radiation, they can be completely dehydrated and then years later resuscitated, and they can exist in outer space without protective covering.  All hail the indestructible water bear!

Tick Tock: time for a new unit – we are starting to study the concepts of time and clocks. This looks like a cool topic, but we loved “Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space” so much, I am afraid that any unit tackled after that book would pale in comparison. Bummer for the clocks.

We Read:  we are more than half way through “Under the Egg” by Laura Marx Fitzgerald. This is the perfect type of book for my son, with intrigue and friendship woven into the complex plot-line, AND we have learned so much – about the paintings of Renaissance painter Raphael, about the Monuments Men of WWII, and last night, about the people-locating resources of various holocaust museums. It is hard to put this book away at the end of each chapter.

Our Le Fictitious Local Diner Story Problem: The local diner sells lots of pumpkin, apple, and pecan pies in November (but not mince, because the chef thinks mince pies are just awful). If the diner sells 80 pies the week before Thanksgiving, and 60% are apple, how many apple pies are we talking about?  If the diner is planning to bake 150 pies for Thanksgiving week, using the same percentage, how many apple pies should be prepared?

Our music theme for last night was “Fanfare for the Water Bear”.  Why not?  This invincible organism surely needs a glam theme song. One of these might be perfect:

  • “Water Music, Alla Hornpipe” from Handel’s “Water Music in D Major”– is this the perfect fanfare for the little super bug?  It was perfect for King George I as he cruised up and down the Thames.
  • “The Aquarium” from Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals” – for the water bear looking for dreamy relaxation music with a bit of star power (this music was used at the beginning of the “Beauty and the Beast” movie).
  • “The Wild Bears” from Sir Edward Elgar’s suite, “The Wand of Youth” – we LOVE the high voltage energy this piece. It scampers all over the place. Maybe this is the theme music for the bad boy water bear?

Welcome to the best part of my day!

– Jane BH