The Nutcracker ballet is definitely our theme for this December. Dagfari's ballet school did selections for its fall recital last Saturday (his class did the Russian dance), and we went to see the NCSA production last night. And D is playing the title role of Nutcracker/Prince in a production this coming weekend. This came about because the daughter of a friend is playing Clara in this Nutcracker (which is put on by a dance school in Reynolds Auditorium), and there are no boy students in the school to play her prince. Rehearsal has been pretty intense-- basically ballet every night for a month, with a bit of a break for Thanksgiving. And he's giving three performances this weekend. Makes the whole end-of-semester/holiday season even busier for everyone, but D is having a great time, so it's worth it.
The SGS curriculum this month is mostly just ballet and art history. Sinterklaas gave D the DVD set of the BBC Private Life of Masterpieces series, which is interesting even for the non-art obsessed in our household. And he spends many hours each day practicing his dance steps, which is a bit dangerous what with the Christmas tree in the living room and kittens dashing around all over the place. Michigan relatives can look forward to a private performance over the holidays, I'm sure. Start clearing floor space now!
Monday, December 8, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Catching up on October
OK, so Thanksgiving is almost here, and I haven't even caught up on my October posting. So in a nutshell, our major excitement in October was a visit to the Maryland cousins and D.C. area art museums during ProfDad's fall break. J and G, and their parents, were wonderful hosts as usual, and we had a great time. We also visited the Baltimore Museum of Art and the National Gallery, which was a great thrill for the budding art historian. The homeschooling thing is really paying off-- Dagfari pretty much gave us a guided tour of the museums and filled us in on the history, techniques, and significance of many paintings.
In keeping with the art theme for the month, David went out on Halloween as Vincent VanGogh. This costume was received very well (we seem to have a fairly artistically literate neighborhood) and earned him extra treats from an appreciative art teacher neighbor.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Obamarama!
Lots of excitement in the past month, which I'll need to catch up on soon. But this week SGS is winding up an intensive civics unit! Dagfari had been suffering from election fatigue (who hasn't?) and was less than enthusiastic about political signs in our front yard detracting from his Halloween decor. But the actual election was so exciting that he was quite won over. D was the one following the electoral results on both the NPR and MSNBC websites on Tuesday night, and he now has a much better understanding of the electoral college than I did at any time before November 2000. We all stayed up for the acceptance speech, and we celebrated again today when NC was finally declared officially blue. I like the fact that this is the first presidential election D will really remember.
D is now having a mock election with his stuffed animals (who are a contentious bunch), in which the big issues are national security, regulation of the candy mining industry, and an overhaul of the currency system. If the art history thing doesn't work out, I'm beginning to think D may have a future as a policy wonk.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
El Greco to Velazquez
We went to see this exhibit at Duke yesterday. Spanish baroque art, quite impressive. D is reading through the exhibit catalog today. I still have trouble appreciating El Greco-- I always think his people look like they've been painted on silly putty and then stretched-- which probably just proves that I'm an artistic philistine.
But it was a really interesting exhibit in many ways. Paintings were arranged by genre so as to contrast how different artists interpreted the same themes. We highly recommend going, if you're within driving distance of Durham.
Dagfari's recommended background reading: How to Read a Painting: Lessons from the Old Masters, by Patrick De Rynck.
Dagfari's impressions of the exhibit:
"This exhibit not only captured the spirit of the art of the time, it captured everything that happened. One of my favorite paintings was Velazquez's "The Immaculate Conception". Velazquez has captured an air of tranquility in a scene that is full of motion and religious drama. I also liked Eugenio Cajes's " Christ at Calvary", which was a common theme and composition. Compared to similar paintings, Cajes's work has a feeling of loneliness, and the black background gives an air of cold and of night. I am hoping to go back and see it again!"
But it was a really interesting exhibit in many ways. Paintings were arranged by genre so as to contrast how different artists interpreted the same themes. We highly recommend going, if you're within driving distance of Durham.
Dagfari's recommended background reading: How to Read a Painting: Lessons from the Old Masters, by Patrick De Rynck.
Dagfari's impressions of the exhibit:
"This exhibit not only captured the spirit of the art of the time, it captured everything that happened. One of my favorite paintings was Velazquez's "The Immaculate Conception". Velazquez has captured an air of tranquility in a scene that is full of motion and religious drama. I also liked Eugenio Cajes's " Christ at Calvary", which was a common theme and composition. Compared to similar paintings, Cajes's work has a feeling of loneliness, and the black background gives an air of cold and of night. I am hoping to go back and see it again!"
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Ode to Fall
A poem by Dagfari, inspired, he says, by the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
When Old Septembre
Came again
In glorious array, with
Shadows long,
And each blooming blossom
Giving homage to the sun,
In glints of dew.
'Twas then that even the spiders
Wove their webs of finest silk,
Which shone silver
In the morning light,
And shadows leapt around,
In playful dance,
To celebrate the coming
Of the Fall.
When Old Septembre
Came again
In glorious array, with
Shadows long,
And each blooming blossom
Giving homage to the sun,
In glints of dew.
'Twas then that even the spiders
Wove their webs of finest silk,
Which shone silver
In the morning light,
And shadows leapt around,
In playful dance,
To celebrate the coming
Of the Fall.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Dagfari Goes to Lake Wobegon
Author Garrison Keillor paid a visit to WFU this morning, sponsored by Bookmarks. I got to be the official photographer for the event (because we couldn't find a real photographer who was free on a Monday morning! ), and I took D along as my assistant.
We worked hard but had a great time. For any GK fans who are wondering, I'm happy to report that he was most charming, witty, and gracious. He was ostensibly promoting his new book, but he gave an hour-long talk on topics ranging from church music to Elizabethan sonnets.
Dagfari's synopsis: "He said that his writing style originally came from his childhood and his family's religious beliefs. Also that it was good that he suffered as a child, because through suffering comes a need to express oneself. He had to read the King James bible a lot, so he was prepared when, at school, his teacher had him memorize Shakespeare and other poets."[Shakespeare trivia from Dagfari: Shakespeare may actually have contributed to or edited the KJV. He would have been 35 years old when it was written, and the 35th word from the beginning is "shake" and the 35th word from the end is "spear".]
GK also talked a lot about poetry in general and sonnets in particular, especially about the way the limitations of the sonnet form help to distill a writer's thoughts by forcing him to choose his words carefully.
We had a great time, and I even got some good pictures!
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Math with Leonardo
"If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiousity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done-- I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education."-- Paul Lockhart, "The Mathematician's Lament"
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
I love this essay. It certainly describes my experience with math in school-- a bunch of random facts that inspired boredom, anxiety, and in the end the conviction that, however well I did in other subjects, I was not really smart, because I was bad at math.
My experience isn't unusual, so it's not surprising that math is intimidating to homeschoolers. Even unschooly types seem more likely to resort to a packaged curriculm for math. That's what we did last year-- the only workbook we had was the 4th grade Singapore Math. Dagfari worked his way through it because we insisted. I think I hated it as much as he did. I couldn't pretend that this math was anything but boring, and I didn't know how to connect it to anything D was actually interested in.
So when I ran across Paul Lockhart's essay this summer, I decided that we had to make a change. There was not much point in Dagfari learning to hate math as much as I had. But how to make math an interesting, creative endeavor for a boy whose obsessive interest at the moment was Renaissance art?
The answer came as I was browsing the shelves at the library and came across a book called Math and the Mona Lisa. This sounded somewhat promising. After I listened to an interview with the author on NPR, I decided to use it as our math textbook for the fall.
And so far, it's working. I'm reading it aloud to Dagfari, and we're both having the novel experience of finding mathematical principles that are relevant to things we're actually interested in. We not only understand the Fibonacci sequence (more or less), we also understand why we should care about it, why mathematicians find it fascinating. And Dagfari even got out his old math workbook to investigate the geometry section further.
So for now, we've shelved the long division and pre-algebra and "math facts". We have, for the first time, a fully integrated homeschool curriculm. And more importantly, Dagfari doesn't hate math.
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
I love this essay. It certainly describes my experience with math in school-- a bunch of random facts that inspired boredom, anxiety, and in the end the conviction that, however well I did in other subjects, I was not really smart, because I was bad at math.
My experience isn't unusual, so it's not surprising that math is intimidating to homeschoolers. Even unschooly types seem more likely to resort to a packaged curriculm for math. That's what we did last year-- the only workbook we had was the 4th grade Singapore Math. Dagfari worked his way through it because we insisted. I think I hated it as much as he did. I couldn't pretend that this math was anything but boring, and I didn't know how to connect it to anything D was actually interested in.
So when I ran across Paul Lockhart's essay this summer, I decided that we had to make a change. There was not much point in Dagfari learning to hate math as much as I had. But how to make math an interesting, creative endeavor for a boy whose obsessive interest at the moment was Renaissance art?
The answer came as I was browsing the shelves at the library and came across a book called Math and the Mona Lisa. This sounded somewhat promising. After I listened to an interview with the author on NPR, I decided to use it as our math textbook for the fall.
And so far, it's working. I'm reading it aloud to Dagfari, and we're both having the novel experience of finding mathematical principles that are relevant to things we're actually interested in. We not only understand the Fibonacci sequence (more or less), we also understand why we should care about it, why mathematicians find it fascinating. And Dagfari even got out his old math workbook to investigate the geometry section further.
So for now, we've shelved the long division and pre-algebra and "math facts". We have, for the first time, a fully integrated homeschool curriculm. And more importantly, Dagfari doesn't hate math.
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