Nutcracker Sweet

BALLET TODAY: Today was the day Bee has been waiting for for weeks now. We had tickets for a matinee of The Nutcracker at Pacific Northwest Ballet.

I was going to take them but when I heard Rick had the day off, I assigned him the duty. :) He'd never seen The Nutcracker (my bad!) and so this was his opportunity, too.

I dropped the three amigos off at McCaw Hall. They were way early, so they headed to the Seattle Center Food Court for a treat before going into the show. I think the pre-show pretzel was the highlight of the day for CJ. ;) The kids had good seats - on the floor, row P. They said they could see everything really well.

We rendezvoused in the Food Court after the show. Right away I asked CJ how he liked it.

"It was mediocre," he deadpanned.

I immediately turned to Rick and said, "Did you tell him to say 'it was mediocre.'?" He laughed and said he didn't. I had no idea CJ even knew the word mediocre.

I asked to elaborate on his impressions. He did, saying, "I think it's the most boring play I've ever seen, because it took like 20 minutes to do their play." (It was more like two hours.)

He did say his favorite scene was "where the Mouse King showed up. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King had a sword fight."

Bee's review of the production was more favorable. Her favorite part was "when the ballerina and the guy who was in the soldier costume without the hat danced together."

Rick's take was, "It was good, but the story's confusing." Poor Rick. I should have given him a Nutcracker storybook to study up on.

Later in the day we talked a bit about sets and props - what they are and how they were used in The Nutcracker. CJ said his favorite set today was a sailboat on the ocean. Annabelle was impressed by an Egyptian looking set after "the ballerina and the soldier guy got out of the boat."

After the show, we checked out the great big train display in the Center House.
There were lots of neat little vignettes within the snowy town.

LEGOLINE: Today Annabelle asked if LEGO has a Web site. I told her I'm certain it does, guessing LEGO.com to be its URL. She navigated her way there and quickly found lots to keep her interested.

While she could have played Toy Story or SpongBob themed games, Annabelle's favorite was a game under the LEGO Kingdoms category called Prison Carriage Pursuit. Interesting choice.


While poking around the Web site, I found a cool feature under their CreateAndShare tab. Called DesignbyME, it's free, downloadable software that allows you to design LEGO creations with your computer. That's something we'll have to check out in the near future!


THINGS ARE GOING TO CHANGE: Out of nowhere this a.m. CJ declared, "When I'm president I will say dogs should not go in the alone down place of planes. They should be up with the humans. I don't want them to stay in cargo all alone and in the dark."


"They should be in a cage," suggested Annabelle.


"They will go up with the human - well up in a cage with the humans," he clarified. "They could go in a pet kennel."

LETTERS, WE'VE GOT LETTERS: The day's writing assignment was a missive to Jolly Ol' St. Nick.

I didn't give they kids much direction, other than to start with Dear Santa, and to not mIx UP their CapiTal and LOWerCase letters, and to use punctuation.


Their letters were succinct.

Annabelle's:

Dear Santa, I want a Xbox 360 thanks. Love, Annabelle. .P.S. Give me an acorden too please.


That's accordion for those of you wondering.


CJ's:

Dear Santa, I want a Krang Toy. Please with nothing missing that's 11 inches tall.


The reason for CJ's clarification is because this toy is vintage and most of those he's been oogling on eBay have missing parts.

DRAMA-RAMA: This morning, even before the play, CJ asked what a drama is - as in the drama genre of movies/shows. I explained by first telling him what it isn't. A drama's not a comedy (like the "Home Alone" movies), it's not a horror movie, like "Friday the 13th," it's not a mystery - like "Scooby Doo." "A drama is just a story," I concluded. According to a few resources I checked, it's a "serious" story. I found that an interesting distinction, and I'm trying to think of drama movies that would be exceptions to that definition. Anyone? ...


SWEET SOMETHINGS: The holiday festivities continued this evening when Christian took the kids to the annual "gingerbread" (graham cracker) house decorating party at the Magnolia Community Center.

With Bows of Hally

Operation Decoration continues - today we unearthed the CeeJ and Bee trees

WEIGH TO GO: We continued our math chapter on weights. The kids seem to be grasping the 16 ounces in a pound thing quicker than 12 inches in a foot. No idea why. ...

Today we did some estimating. I lined up CJ's beloved nutcrackers and asked questions like, "Do you think this weighs closer to 4 ounces or 4 pounds?" We made guesses, weighed and compared them all before they got to the written work in their math books.

While they were working in their books, Mr. Curious asked me, "Why is the abbreviation for pounds 'lb.'?"

Um, good question. And one I couldn't believe I didn't have an answer for. Drat! How did I get to be 45 without knowing that?! Lame!

Turns out the Latin words "libra pondo" describe a Roman unit of weight similar to a pound. So the abbreviation "lb" is derived from the Latin word libra, and our pound comes from pondo.

I'm so glad CJ is so curious.

STOOPID LANGWIDG: I have decided we're going back to spelling lists for awhile. We're going to concentrate on the stupidly spelled-but-common words first.

Yesterday we worked on "shun" words - that's right, the ones that (inexplicably) end in TION. I had the kids help generate a list of tion words and they wrote the words down. This morning we did a low key spelling bee with the TION words and they nailed 'em all. Having conquered those, it was time for something more challenging. The dreaded OUGH words.

We started off with the UFF sounding ones (rough, tough, enough ...). Next, we moved on to ones with an OW sound (bough, drought), followed by OO (through) , the long O (dough, though, although), and, of course, the AHs (though, bought, brought). Isn't the English language fun, Fun, FUN!!!

As the kids were writing the ridiculously spelled words down, they were amused by me serenading them with a song about OUGH words sung to the tune "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain."

THE GLOVED ONES: For some a.m. exercise, we popped the rented "Michael Jackson Experience" back in the Wii and the kids took turns choosing songs to dance to.

It was interesting - they were very nearly 100 percent better at it than they were last night, according to the scoring system built into the Wii remote. Pretty impressive - and it goes to show how quickly they can pick things up.

They danced for over a half hour and even worked up a bit of a sweat. Several times throughout the rest of the day, I heard them humming Michael Jackson tunes under their breath.

ON TOP OF THE WORLD: The kids learned a bit more about Santa's stomping grounds - the North Pole - thanks to a BrainPop video. They watched it twice and then took the comprehension test, which they passed.

CHASERS: Annabelle had soccer class this afternoon. It's pretty comical to watch. Ah, nothing like coaching 5 and 6 year olds who are spazzing around, kicking balls all over a gym. I could tell her teacher was a little frustrated a couple of times, but I can't say that I blamed him. ... It was like trying to herd chickens.

In Orbit

logo: SpaceX.com media kit
ROCKET FIRE!: If you're in to spacey stuff, today was a Big Deal.
Our morning started by watching a SpaceX launch a Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The launch was a demonstration for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. What made it historic is, after a successful liftoff and orbit, this would be the first attempt by a commercial company to recover a spacecraft reentering from low-Earth orbit.
As soon as I cued up the live launch Web cast on my computer screen CJ said, "That's Florida!"
We started watching coverage at about half past 6 a.m. At about 7:40, CJ said, "OMG, only three minutes!"

After the Space Shuttle retires (just two more missions are planned), SpaceX will carry cargo to and from the International Space Station as part of a contract for NASA. The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft were designed to one day carry astronauts, but today it was an unmanned flight. But it was still exciting to watch!

I started watching NASA's coverage, but thought to hop to SpaceX's Web site. Once I got there, I found their countdown clock was more than a minute ahead, their launchpad camera was closer, and once the rocket lifted off, they had an on board cam. Cool!

Annabelle rose from bed just seconds after the rocket lifted off.

About 3.5 hours and 50,000 miles later, the Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean about 500 miles off of the coast of Mexico, and it was recovered, mission accomplished!

SO SWEET: CJ, emerging from the shower this morning, said, "Well hi, Mom. Good to see you again!" :)

DRAMA QUEEN: Rick stopped by today because he needed a photo of him appearing compassionate or sensitive or something like that for a school project. We decided a pic of him putting a Band Aid on a distressed Annabelle would suffice.

I was worried about Annabelle being able to pull off the act, but let me tell you, she nailed it repeatedly. It was Rick who was having trouble getting into character. He looked indifferent. Non plussed. Bemused. Just about anything but compassionate. Of course we ended up in hysterics - and we settled for this shot ...

TREE-D: It "felt" like it was time to make a Christmas-y craft this morning, so we used some sparkly scrapbook paper to make some three-dimensional trees.
Mega Man and Shadow Man approved. :)
SCIENCE TIME: We headed up north for science this afternoon, where we continued our unit on balancing. The hour was filled with experimenting with different shapes, a balance "beam" (a craft stick taped to the desk), and counterweights.

A good, educational time was had by all. Today we made two new discoveries at the Shoreline campus. One was a play room. It's a classroom with toys for the K-1 set, I'd guess, but there were a couple of older kids in there, too. CJ and Annabelle didn't want to leave when it was time, but we only had about 5 minutes to check it out because we had to hustle to class.

While the kids were getting settled in class, I went down to the curriculum/resource room I've been wanting to check out forever. There are all sorts of textbooks and reference materials in there available for checkout (above and beyond the nice big library's collection).

I didn't go hog wild today - I limited myself to two items. One is a book about doing research scavenger hunts using the Internet and books. That will be a good exercise for the kids. I also scored a neat little tabletop theater I suspected Annabelle would love. I was right. She spent a good part of the afternoon/evening playing with it. It's pretty nifty - there are several characters (all on sticks!), and you can swap the backdrops out, too.

THRILLER: Today, CJ insisted we rent "The Michael Jackson Experience" for the Wii. OK, you asked for it ...

Avatars of MJ and a couple backup dancers are on the screen and you have to try to mimic their moves. It actually looked pretty fun. They had a couple dozen King of Pop songs to choose from. They were definitely novices, but gave it a good go. We'll try again in the a.m.

Operation Decoration

TREE TIME: It occurs to me this morning that we're already a week into December. That means Christmas is only two weeks and two days away! How the hell did that happen?! :0
But there's no time to worry about where time went. We needed to get busy on the Campus Christmasification program!

While the kids worked on some schoolwork, I rooted around storage closets and managed to find our fabulous foil-y tree. So we started with that. Annabelle was enthusiastic about the process. She carefully took each of the 70 branches out of their protective sleeves and handed them to me for placement in the "trunk."

CJ helped stick a couple of boughs in the trunk, but he was mostly happy to leave the "heavy lifting" to us.

UP TO THE TASK: Right after the tree, out came CJ's favorite Christmas decorations - a small collection of nutcrackers. He was so happy to see them and has played with them all day long. I do believe they all now have names/titles/ranks. The largest one is King Cracker and the lesser ones must call him "Sir." :)

CJ had lots of questions about nutcrackers today - most notably, do they work? I told him the ones we had were mostly ornamental - they're sold to be used as decorations, not really to be used as tools. That said, I thought we should try them out.

Fortunately, we had peanuts around. The kids cracked several with nutcrackers of all sizes. It made quite a mess, but they had fun.
In case you were wondering, as CJ was, when nutcrackers were invented, it's likely that humans have been using tools (like rocks, for instance) to crack nuts forever.

For more specifics, we turned to the Leavenworth Nutcracker Museum on the other side of the Cascades from us. The museum reports the oldest known metal nutcracker dates to the third or fourth century B.C. The Leavenworth museum has a bronze Roman nutcracker dated between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D in its collection. The earliest wooden nutcrackers were just a couple of pieces of wood fastened by a leather strap or a metal hinge. By the 15th and 16th century, wood carvers in Europe were making ornate nutcracker. In 1872, a man named Wilhelm Füchtner is said to have made the first commercial production run of nutcrackers, using a lathe.

I'm sure lots of lovely nutcrackers are still made in Europe, but but I'm guessing that 99.9 percent of the nutcrackers we see in stores 'round these parts are made in China.

TIMELY TITLES: Today we read two books about Hanukkah. The first was "The Best Hanukkah Ever," in which a family misunderstands their rabbi's suggestion to buy gifts "that will be treasured forever." The family thought of gifts they personally would treasure forever, rather than what the recipient would value. Fortunately, the rabbi was able to set them all straight in the end.

The second book we read was "Elijah's Angel," which told the story about the friendship of an elderly black Christian man who was a barber and woodcarver and a young Jewish boy. The boy loves Elijah's woodworking and is thrilled to receive a gift from him, but there were two problems - it was a Christmas gift and it was a "graven image" - an angel. The boy is afraid to show it to his parents, but he finally does. The parents are very receptive to the barber's gesture is an act of kindness and friendship, which is always welcome.

The kids liked the story but the illustrations, well, not so much. They were colorful, I'll give them that, but the style, hmm, well, perhaps CJ said it best. "Why does it look like he doesn't have any skin?" he asked, pointing to one character. And he was right, the guy (who was, in fact, Elijah, the star of the story) looked rather like a burn victim. What I found most disturbing was the characters hands. They were disproportionately huge compared to their bodies. It creeped me out. I couldn't get past it (can you tell?).

IN BALANCE: The kids got their science homework done today. They were supposed to round up several objects around the house and try to balance them on their finger. They tried lids, remotes, LEGOs, paper plates, Pop Tarts, lots of toys and a banana.

They recorded their trials and tribulations on a sheet to turn in tomorrow.

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES: The new math chapter we started today is about weights. To help the kids get a feel for it, I found a few props around the house - a couple cans of pop, some small freeweights and a postal scale.

We talked about ounces and pounds, grams and kilograms.

Hopefully these concrete examples will stick in the kids' heads as we put pencil to paper on these weighty matters.

WHAT'S GOING ON?: Oh, how the "mighty" have fallen. According to a new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States has fallen from top of the class to average in world education rankings.

The report compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds around the world, and of the 34 OECD countries, the U.S. ranks 14th in reading skills, 17th for science and - are you sitting down?- 25th for mathematics.

Unfortunately, the story I read was long on stats. Are we getting worse, or is it simply others are getting that much better?

No matter how you slice it, we are getting our asses handed to us. ...

Monday of Music and Movement

MERRY CHRISTMOOSE: We don't often do straight up coloring for art lessons here at MPA, but today we made an exception. I got an email from the Seattle Mariners with the latest news, and on their Web site I spied a link to Mariners Holiday Coloring Pages. The images were pretty darn cute and the kids (yes, even CJ) wanted to color one, so that's what they did. They had their choice of several designs, but they both opted to do the lights-in-the-antlers moose.
While he was coloring, CJ started talking about how his coloring and cartooning skills have improved thanks to the (online) Bruce Blitz lessons the kids love. That's really great to hear.

SPACE RACE CONT'D: We spent time last week talking about the space race between the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. While America and Russia work cooperatively on some space missions (most notably, the International Space Station), the competition is alive and well.

The first headline I read today noted a big blow to the Russia in the space race. I showed the kid the story, about how a rocket carrying three Russian navigation satellites failed to reach orbit.
The satellites were supposed to put a satellite navigation system in place to rival the U.S.'s global Positioning System (GPS). Instead, they wound up off the coast of Hawaii. Bummer, dude.

A programming error is suspected. Pity the poor programmer(s) - sounds like the Russian government is NOT pleased. ...

REPORT CARDS: I spent several hours last night and this morning preparing the kids' monthly progress reports. While it's a lot of work, certainly the time of reflection is well spent. It really helps me hone in to what I want to work on on the upcoming month(s). Our goals for December include more (and faster, in CJ's case) writing and some good ol' fashioned spelling drills.

MATH MADNESS: Per usual, we plugged away at math today. We have reached the end of a chapter and so today's exercise was a longish chapter review.

At different points, each Annabelle and CJ were basically in meltdown mode. CJ was unhappy when he had to write out numbers (like 'four hundred eighty three') and Annabelle freaked out when she (momentarily) forgot how to add and subtract numbers in the hundreds (she for some reason forgot she needed to put the numbers in columns).

Fortunately, the crises passed.

DANCEY DANCE: Today was a "we can watch" day in Bee's ballet class. Yay!
She was a joy to watch, and is clearly the "go to" girl in class when the teacher asks a question of the group and no one else answers. :)


During the free dance (final 4 minutes) portion of the class, they danced to music from The Nutcracker. Annabelle was a twirling dervish.





When the dancing was done Annabelle walked over toward us and CJ jumped up from where he was sitting, ran out to her, put his hands on her shoulders and declared, "Annabelle, you were AWESOME out there!"

The people within earshot all went, "Awwwww," and I heard a couple say, "What a nice brother." :)

UP TO THE CHALLENGE: While hunting down an educational game for Annabelle on the PBS Web site, today I stumbled across several Web pages about "The Video Game Revolution," a program which, according to the site, "examines the evolution and history of the video game industry, from the 1950s through today, the impact of video games on society and culture, and the future of electronic gaming."

Unfortunately we missed the show, when it appeared on PBS, but its Internet presence is fascinating. There are pages and pages of information and interactives we'll be exploring.


Today, we started by taking their "Pop Quiz" about classic video games. CJ passed the first round with flying colors. In the second round he was stymied by some super rare games (I know what he'll be researching for days to come!).


LEGIT: And speaking of video games (as we've been known to do), today history was made when the Grammy nominees were announced. For the first time ever music written for a video game has received Grammy recognition. The song, by composer Christopher Ten, is "Baba Yetu," from the game Civilization IV. I encourage you to give it a listen. You'll be glad you did. :)

Naturally, after listening to it, we wondered what the lyrics (lye-ricks, as the kids keep pronouncing the word) mean.

Naturally, we turned to the Internet for an answer. In a fan forum for the game Civilization IV, we learned that the words "Baba Yetu" mean "Our Father" in Swahili and the song is, in effect, the Lord's Prayer in Swahili. Fascinating.

Apparently they perform the song at the Video Games Live! concerts. We can't wait to hear it at the show we're going to in January!