The Sound of Music

FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLEBEE: This morning's excitement - the first day of music classes!

Last spring as we were formulating our alternaschool plot, I researched music classes that would be available to the kids. (I was determined that music instruction be a part of CJ & Annabelle's curriculum as there's so much hard science proving how much students benefit from music education. Plus, Bee and CeeJ both love music, and then, of course, Rick and Ken are great examples of how much music education can do for a kid.)

I cast the net far and wide looking for options. Remarkably - and mercifully - we would up deciding on Musikgarten - and it's a less-than-a-block-walk from our house. Hooray!

We walked over for their 9:15 start time, discussing appropriate ways one might behave at a group music lesson. It's an hour class - with the parents coming back for the last 10 minutes to participate. (In that whole 50 minutes I had child-free, I deep cleaned the bathroom. Such indulgence/luxury!). Upon my return, I was happy to see CJ & Annabelle absolutely rapt at the information teacher Nancy Kubo was sharing. She also clued we parents in on some of the (impressive, comprehensive) curriculum, and the kids shared with us their compositions! Nancy had had them each draw a beehive, and then draw a bee's circuitious flight path away from and back to the hive. The students were instructed to buzz like a bee as they traced the bee's travel with their finger, and Nancy pointed out how this was, in fact, a musical composition. Fascinating!

The kids each got a bag, a folder, a binder and when Nancy handed us a CD we're supposed use for homework, CJ excitedly declared, "I can't wait to listen to that CD!" I couldn't have hoped for a better first music lesson experience for them.

PLAY DATE:From music it was home for a quick snack before heading to "The Village" (downtown Magnolia) for a play date with one of Annabelle's former classmates, Connor. Nice kid, CJ & Annabelle both enjoy playing with him. So, the three clambered around playing pirate, operating ice cream and hamburger stands and other typical playground stuff. This hour served as PE as well as an important social skill building session. (I do NOT want our Magnolia Prep students to become isolated!)

CYBER SCAVENGER HUNT: After watching Numberjacks in Spanish, CJ and Annabelle hit the computer work station for some online fun and learning. We have bought them each memberships to Club Penguin - an online game/community. I love the site. It is, without a doubt, first and foremost a game, but it's more than that. There are challenges and rewards, there is a sense of community (you network and befriend other players from all around the country/globe). They can buy all sorts of costumes, toys, and decorations for their penguins' igloos, but they have to earn the money by doing chores first. Overall, lots of good lessons to be learned there. Today, the site had a special scavenger hunt, and they had to find 7 or 8 items hidden throughout the expansive Club Penguin world. It was great to see CJ and Annabelle deftly using the technology to navigate the game, and how they really worked so closely in tandem to accomplish the task.

PUPPY PREP: Our lives are about to get more complicated. Tomorrow we pick up an 8-week old Havanese puppy. The kids are excited, of course, but I tempered their excitement a bit this afternoon by going over - at length - with them all of the responsibilities of dog ownership. We reviewed three videos online about how to care for a puppy, then made a list of items we needed to get before tomorrow. From there it was off to Fred Meyer to lay in supplies.


TABLE TIME: Back home, it was time for some good old fashioned seat time and worksheets. Annabelle's penmanship needs work, so I gave her some writing exercises. I found a great worksheet for CJ - an exercise that required him to follow multiple steps exactly, from start to finish, in order to complete it. Focus can be a bit of a challenge for him (unless it's a favorite video game!), so I was real curious to see how he'd do. He was totally up to the challenge. He knocked that worksheet out step by step without any help or a single hitch. I was VERY proud of him.

Kiskys at the Bat

Special Agent Oh No: The morning started off on a sour note when I accidentally tuned breakfast-time cartoons to the Disney Channel. To my horror, the dreaded "Special Agent Oso" show was on. Annoying characters, stupid songs, sub par animation and the main character keeps annoyingly turning to the audience and asking for obvious answers to lame questions. But that's just my opinion. Sensing my disdain, CJ said, "You have to get the hang of the show. ... The more you watch it, the more you'll like it." To which I replied, "Um no, Honey. The more I watch it, the more I can't stand it." Of course, rather than just continuing to rail against a fictional character (Dan Quayle's attack on "Murphy Brown" comes to mind), I decided to use our difference of opinion as a teachable moment. Different people like different things. As evidence, all one has to do is flip through the hundred-plus cable channels and realize that someones for some reasons are watching each one of those channels at any given time, I pointed out to the kids. And it's cool to try new things from time to time, but the bottom line is, we all have our own favorites, for our own reasons. And that's OK (said in a Senator Stuart Smalley tone).

Caseys at the Bat: We're well into September, which means baseball season is winding down (oh noze!) That being the case, we decided to take in a Mariners matinée today! While fun and games were to be had, that didn't mean learning took a hiatus. Instead, while Annabelle was at ballet this a.m., CJ and I walked to the Magnolia library. I thought it would be cool to continue our comparing and contrasting multiple versions of the same story, so today's topic was a baseball classic: Casey at the Bat, by Ernest Lawrence Thayer. We checked out two print versions and one audio recording, plus I had another illustrated book version at home. On the way home from the library I popped the audio version - by the London Philharmonic in the CD player. Big mistake. The kids had no frame of reference regarding the story (which first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888), and some guy in a really strange, stilted accent was using phrases like "the rest clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast." A bit heady for a 4-year-old.

Once home, we read a very kid-friendly version together (1993, Scholastic) - with cartoony pics (Patricia Polacco) and Casey's kid sister and his dad are bit players in the story. Next, we read a version published in 2000 with remarkable illustrations by Christopher Bing. A gorgeous book, the pages are montages of drawings and newspaper and advertisements that look like they're straight from 1888. Both versions held CJ & Annabelle's interests - and they had fun hunting through the pages to find the same phrases in each book. They came to understand the antiquated phrasings, and both grew wide eyed when fans chanted, "Kill him! Kill the umpire!" You can tell they've been brought up attending Mariners games in Seattle, not Bronx Bombers games in Yankee Stadium.

Next up in our reading lineup: Casey Back at Bat. The kids were hoping Casey would finally hit his game-winning homer in this go-round, but author Dan Gutman had other ideas. (Nonetheless, it was a great opportunity to talk about what a sequel is and how sometimes they are so horribly disappointing.)

After a break for lunch, I found the reeeeeally old Disney movie of Casey at the Bat on YouTube . I remember watching this in elementary school. What I didn't remember is that right off the bat, the film's opening song declares: "The ladies don't understand baseball a bit. They don't know a strike from a foul or a hit." Oh. Really? Hmpf. (Don't make me come over there and go Paul O'Neill on your ass, Disney.) Perhaps in an attempt to make it up to the ladies, the sequel (there's that word again, kids!) Casey Bats Again is about how Casey has nine daughters who grow up to be baseball studs. Now that's more like it!

Another One Rides the Bus: Before too much longer, it was time to hop the bus to the game. Since we needed exact change for bus fare, it seemed like a good opportunity to review coins and their value. We got out the change jar and counted out our fares. I have to admit, CeeJ and Bee are not quick to catch on to this money thing, and I think I know why - because coins and cash just aren't a part of their culture. We use a debit card everywhere and pay all of our bills online - they just aren't around hard cold cash money. It's something we're going to have keep working on. Anywho, riding the Metro is a novelty for the kids. Unlike a car ride, you get to face sideways (rather than forward) and no seatbelts! "It's like a ride at the fair!" Annabelle declared.

Field of Dreams: What a terrific afternoon for baseball. Sunny and 70 degrees! Our first stop was the playground where the kids ran off some steam.

Then, it was off to our seats for THIRTEEN INNINGS of fun (and that was with us leaving "early" - the game went 14 innings, with Ichiro hitting the game winning single.)



Good times - and lots of good math. Baseball is chock full of figures and stats and it was three plus hours of addition, subtraction, percentages, and so on.

Of course, there was plenty of food and fun to be had too - at one point the Mariners Moose even came to our section and danced with the kids and they were stadium big screen stars! : )

Blending, friending

Table time: We started the day off with worksheets about stories' titles and sequencing. The kids had to look at a storyboard, come up with a title and then describe the action in the story in three sentences (beginning, middle and end). No problemo!

I let them craft/spell their words entirely on their own. (I do believe it being called 'whole word' back when Rick and Ken were kgarteners in the early 90s - yikes!) While I'm a big fan of this approach for emerging writers, I also think it's better if they learn correct spelling sooner rather than later, so to help build that skill, after a quick recess we worked on consonant blends.

I found a Web site with a perfect PowerPoint to work on consonant blends. To make it more fun, for each blend I assigned CJ and Annabelle a letter (for instance, for "bl" CJ was the "b" and Annabelle was the "l", so they made their sounds faster and closer together until they had the perfect blend. They thought that was tons o' fun. Then I asked them to generate words that started with a particular blend before revealing the .PPT's list of words. This is an exercise we'll revisit often, I'm sure.

As usual, they watched Spanish educational programming during lunch, and 1 p.m. brought Zula Patrol. As always, presented a fantastic science lesson in a fun format.

We decided that our Monday field trip will be going to see "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" in IMAX 3-D at the Pacific Science Center. It's based on a children's book. I promptly hopped to the Seattle Public Library Web site hoping to score a copy to read to the kids before the show. Looks like I wasn' the only one with that idea. However, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I was able to find a video of someone reading the book page by page (and picture by picture). So the kids read along with that and then we hopped to the movie's official Web site and watched the trailer/preview. Next, we spent several minutes comparing and contrasting the story line in the book with the one in the movie, noting similarities and differences. (CJ and Annabelle had some astute observations.) We discussed movie adaptations of books and how sometimes things change in the process.

This afternoon we headed out to CJ's Befriended class. We were early, so the kids got to have PE in expansive Meridian Park. One corner has a giant stone construct. Complete with an arch and seats, fit for a king (CeeJ) and queen (Bee), it was great for playing castle.

Back home, the I decided tonight would be a perfect time to get the kids into the act cooking dinner. CJ and Annabelle helped make the sauce, shred the cheese, shape the dough, and spread on sauce and toppings. It was pretty darn good, and they were awfully proud.

Testing 1-2-3

The beginning of a great adventure; This is the chronicle of the Kisky family's World-is-our-Classroom experiment.

We're big on do-it-yourself projects in this household (more on that later), so why should our approach to CJ and Annabelle's eduation be any different?

At least for this year, we're leaving behind the one-size-fits-all approach and have cobbled together a customized class schedule (yay for yoga, music and movement).

Our curriculum will be eclectic. Certainly there will be some direction and focus, but we're also always on the lookout for teachable moments.

The journey begins ...