"We have a composer of the month?"
"Now we do."
Really, why do they always question when we do something new. Do they do that in "real" school, as well?
I love classical music and we play a lot of it -- when we have a stereo. We didn't have one those past 8 months since we didn't pack ours and the house in Chisinau didn't have one. I missed it more than I realized because now music is playing all the time.
I had planned to incorporate music into the curriculum but I forgot the recorders in Germany (just like the stereo), and the piano is still a plan (when we have a new posting), so I thought at least they should have some passive exposure. I bought three installments of the "Classical Kids" series, among them Mr. Bach comes to call. It's delightful, really. I would like to hear more of the music at times but that's easily fixed. We have the Magic Flute as well and Alan likes to listen to it while building Legos. It's sometimes amazing to me how much the kids pick up from these CDs.
While we listened to the music, I had the idea that we could go and visit the Bach Museum which is just an hour north of here, and visit the Organ Museum (also in English, by yours truly) in Ostheim, and... and then I had this idea about the composer of the month. A month of intensive listening to and hearing about one particular composer. Brilliant, right?
For Bach, a month seems almost not enough so we begin now, in November. I have to stock up a bit on my CDs which is never bad and next week, we do the field trip to Eisenach and a week later, we go to Ostheim to visit the Organ museum. We'll talk about his life and listen to his music, we'll learn what a fugue is and much more.
The result of today's intensive listening to Bach is that Alan wants to learn to play the violin. He fell violently in love with the violin concertos and while that is healthy and normal, I'm not at all sure about the violin thing. It's cheaper than an organ, though, so there's that.
Oh, I owe you the cinquain the boys produced -- it was a cooperation:
Redwood
big, strong, sturdy
growing, living, thriving,
towering over the forest
I'm small.
The cinquain is a fun format and the kids are ever getting better at their poetry. Only the poetic riddles today resulted in a lot of Tolkien-quotations. But you know, the one I came up with, they solved in microseconds:
Shrieking, screaming
Always wanting attention...
I had a third and a fourth line but they blurted the answer out in unison. I guess I'm too predictable. So we bagged the riddles. Tolkien is hard to beat.
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