Nine is fine

Today is Daniel’s birthday and it’s a fine sunny Spring day.  The frogs are singing, the birds are twittering and making nests, and the gophers are poking out of their holes.
One of Daniel’s presents this morning was the Marty Robbins CD Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959) which we listened to with breakfast (pancakes, bacon, [...]

Curtain Up

Tonight’s the big night and the kids are very, very excited. A bit pooped from yesterday’s full dress rehearsal, but very, very excited nonetheless. It’s going to be a busy weekend, with Friday and Saturday evening performances, and one Sunday afternoon too.  Tom got a sneak peak at the orchestra last night, and [...]

Banned in Boston

One of the funniest obits I’ve read in a long time, from today’s New York Times for the late great Ruth Wallis:
Ruth Wallis, a cabaret singer of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s who was known as the Queen of the Party Song for the genteelly risqué numbers she performed for happy, and very occasionally horrified, [...]

Everyone’s a critic

We were driving to town the other evening for a Christmas party and I popped Diana Krall’s Christmas Songs, recently borrowed from the library, into the player. I was feeling rather festive, and the kids were quietly enjoying the music. Or so I thought.
“Is she famous?” came a small voice from the back [...]

Paddle your own canoe

Shooting the Rapids, oil on canvas, 1879, by
Frances Anne Hopkins
We were doing farm chores and driving around in truck the other week with the radio set to CBC, as usual, when I caught a bit of music and Shelagh Roger’s comment that it was based on the Caldecott Honor book by Holling Clancy Holling — [...]

Combining combining and pirates

We started combining the crops, wheat and barley, today. And I understand tomorrow is supposed to be Talk Like a Pirate Day.
I’m not the first person to notice that combines look rather like ships, sailing steadily and majestically through waves of grain. And while you wait on the truck, or run up the [...]

Tapping toes and teaching to tests

Go on to sleep now, third grader of mine.The test is tomorrow but you’ll do just fine.It’s reading and math. Forget all the rest.You don’t need to know what is not on the test.
Each box that you mark on each test that you take,Remember your teachers. Their jobs are at stake.Your score is their score, [...]

Festival report

We spent most of yesterday at the first day of the town’s arts festival. The boys each recited a poem in the morning for Speech Arts, and in the evening Laura performed her musical theater number, “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music.
For the past few years, the kids have entered just the Speech [...]

A child’s introduction to classic art and classical music

New to me, from the March 2007 issue of Canadian Family magazine, found yesterday at the library:
Can You Hear It?, book and accompanying audio cd, by William Lach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (published by Abrams); suggested for ages four to ten. From the Met Store website:
A bustling cityscape full of cars and people; [...]

Raising hep cats: Reading about, and listening to, modern American music

Children’s author and home educating father Chris Barton at Bartography is mulling over choices for picture books about modern American music and musicians, mostly for his almost three-year-old son, and wrote the other week, “As for those books already on the shelves, there are far more worthy titles than one family can take on in [...]

Musical accompaniments for Ben and Me (and Davy Crockett, too)

I was at Amazon looking for a CD version of the old LP Davy Crockett — Western Adventures with Fess Parker, Buddy Ebsen, and Gene Autry when I chanced upon Davy Crockett’s Fiddle, music from Crockett’s time performed on Crockett’s own fiddle by Dean Shostak, who began playing violin at Colonial Williamsburg at age [...]