musical education

Music equals love in many ways for our family. We have been trying out a new curriculum for everything but reading and math, and one of the subjects is music. The coursework mainly follows a very classical western musical theme and the kids have been loving it. Yesterday we started our lesson with a game. The kids had to be on a team and when I asked them questions, they had to come up with an answer as a group and then pick one person as the spokesperson. They were all so excited for the game that they just couldn't help answering during someone else's turn. Our music lesson seemed more like a brawl for a little bit, but the music brought us back and we learned more about Bach. But who wants to stop at just Bach when you have sweet albums like 'Switched on Bach' and 'Switched on Bach II'? Which led to an interesting discussion of classical music used in contemporary ways. And then we got to see that Darth Vader really loves German opera (Die Valkyrie was a new acquisition I was itching to introduce anyway) and our day was spent listening to records and playing at the park. Surely a day well spent.

But maybe we should have some team building exercises.

And then, I took Lucy to her group violin lessons, and a magical thing happened. There is a Bach Festival in Moscow. Who knew? So we just told our other music nerdy homeschool friends and joined in the festivities.

It wasn't very child friendly. We were definitely the only families. I could feel the glare of the soloist, even though we were as quiet as we could possibly be. Which is mostly quiet. It's okay, though. The kids were totally disappointed in him. We all agreed he had a beautiful voice. But he's no fugue. They liked the flute player who played for about 39 seconds, though. So, it was not a complete loss. And we got to show Grandma a little bit of Moscow. She was impressed how extremely close we are to Idaho.