Baroque Music: Handel

This week we're continuing our exploration of baroque music with Georg Friederic Handel, famous German composer who wrote for the British Royal Court. The "Getting to Know the World's Composers" book George Handel tells his biography in an entertaining, kid-friendly manner.

My kids also loved the audio adventure by Classical Kids called Hallelujah, Handel, which we checked out from our local library. Bonus: all of the background music is his work! 

Here are a few more internet resources related to Handel:

Classics for Kids has some lovely short episodes about Handel and his music.

Making Music Fun has a free printable Handel word search for early elementary kids, and Super Coloring has a bust-style coloring page. This PDF from Arts Alive CA includes a biography, interesting cultural references for the period, and a great guide to Handel's major works. 

This unit would be fun to do around Christmas, in conjunction with listening to Handel's Messiah.

Have a great weekend, bookworms!

Penguins

I know I promised a sequel to our intro to baroque music, but the skies opened up and dumped snow on us and I couldn't resist spending some time on penguins! See our sensory table fun below to see why I'm stoked by the snow.

Our favorite penguin picture book is Usborne's How Big is a Million. Great help with visual math skills!

To get our youngest readers up and moving on a snowy day, the scanimation Waddle and Eric Carle's From Head to Toe feature penguins getting their groove on.

My chapter book reader loves the Magic Treehouse Eve of the Emperor Penguin, and my pre-k son loves to listen to it read on CD. We'll be cracking that one out at bedtime tonight to round off our penguin playtime.

Here's our fun sensory activity with snow: I put a towel on the table, get a bin full of snow from outside the back door, set out a bowl of plastic "ice" and a bowl of penguins, and voila! Snowy indoor penguin fun. Nicole inspired this play set-- check out her version of Icy Penguins, to include a link to kid-safe instant fake snow (not for those who put things in their mouths).

Our art project was to make penguins out of our shoe prints and handprints.  I think they turned out pretty cute! We used oil pastels for the snowflakes and other details.

Storytime Katie has some other great penguin story ideas, to include this cute fingerplay that my kids insisted on doing over and over again:

Fingerplay: “Two Little Penguins”

Two little penguins sitting on the ice (hold up two fingers)

One bows once, the other bows twice (made index fingers bow)

Waddle little penguins. Waddle away. (put fingers behind back)

Come back penguins. Time to play! (bring fingers to the front)

Credit: King County Library System

See you next week!

Baroque Music: Vivaldi

This year I've been devising a History of Music curriculum that started with Gregorian Chant and will end... with ZZ Top? Who knows. At any rate, the first period in which I've found significant resources for kids has been the Baroque, so that's where I'll begin blog posts.

I chose Vivaldi first, not only because his was the first violin concerto I learned, but also because the Four Seasons is such an easy song to use for visualization. See the book,  Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which conveniently includes the CD. It's long, and was better suited for my first grader than my itty bitties.

Another book my kids enjoyed was the slightly less wordy I, Vivaldi.


For listening pleasure, check out these short but sweet  Classics for Kids episodes
on Vivaldi. I wish they were available in podcast form, but we just played them via the computer and everyone in the family learned something new.

Finally, and I've saved the best for last, the Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery CD was available at our local library, and it's a non-stop auditory adventure rich with original music recordings and suspense. Suitable for all ages and fun enough to hear over and over!

I decided to keep the art project simple this week and just played some Vivaldi music in the background while the kids drew what they heard or felt.

A wonderful way to augment this topic would be a trip to Venice, which has long been on my to-do list while we're stationed abroad. Hopefully we'll make it to the Vivaldi Museum!

On the topic of Venice, the Magic Treehouse book Carnival at Candlelight does not include mention of Vivaldi, but is a wonderful source of information on his hometown for chapter readers.

Come back next week as we continue or our inquiry into Baroque music by exploring the life and music of Handel!

Castles

I'm back after a long hiatus!  We moved to Germany and I took 2 semesters each of biology and organic chemistry, so blogging took a backseat for a while. Nothing like celebrating our return to bookworm fun with a post about castles, especially since you can't throw a cat without hitting some ruin or other here in Europe.
All three of my kids love this picture book, Over at the Castle, reminiscent of  the old folk song, "Over in the Meadow." Great illustrations; the dragon lovers in my family rejoiced.

For non-fiction we enjoyed the Ultimate Explorer Castles and the eye-popping DK Castle. 

Finally, my chapter-book reader has been entranced by The Castle in the Attic, by Elizabeth Winthrop. A classic coming-of-age adventure story.

For this week's art project we found a gorgeous oil pastel/ watercolor castle project from our favorite art teacher over at Deep Space Sparkle. I thought cutting it out to put on colored paper would help it stand out even more.

  

 

Here's a fun fingerplay from a teacher compilation over at Mrs. Steele's Super Kids:

Here is the Prince with the feathered cap (Boys take off caps and bow) 

Here are his boots that go tap, tap. (Boys march around) 

Here is the Princess with a crown. (Girls touch crowns with both hands) 

Here is her lovely velvet gown. (Girls hold out imaginary skirt and curtsy) 

Here is the castle tall and wide. (Lift arms for tall and wide) 

Here they can play safely inside! (Wraps arms around self and hug self)

Here is her lovely velvet gown. (Girls hold out imaginary skirt and curtsy)
Here is the castle tall and wide. (Lift arms for tall and wide)
Here they can play safely inside! (Wraps arms around self and hug self)



Finally, I couldn't resist augmenting this activity with a little field trip to a local castle outfitted with a youth hostel within its very walls. The place was enormous, the town perfectly charming, and the accommodations perfect for my family. Three bunk beds, ya can't beat that!

I'll try to be back in another week with something out of my new music history project.  Stay tuned!

Archaeology

This week we dug for clues in the past here at Bookworm fun. Theme: archaeology!

A lot of the archaeology books in the juvenile section of the library were for upper elementary age kids, and we just paraphrased or read only the interesting portions. Here are a few that were more geared toward my little guys: Archaeologists Dig for Clues, Magic School Bus Shows and Tells: A Book About Archaeology and, if you don't mind cheating by straying into paleontology, Digging up Dinosaurs.

 

T. was very excited about the idea of digging up artifacts and immediately drew a picture of his imaginary finds:

For our activity this week I took an idea straight out of the Activity Book for the Story of the World and created an archaeological "dig" in our backyard.  I buried everyday objects and then had the boys come dig them up, annotating which quadrant they found them in and everything.  With each item we talked about what it told us about the people who "once lived here."  I used all sorts of things, from a CD to a hair tie, a vitamin bottle to a bottle of nail polish.  It was a lot of good, messy fun.

Come back next week and see what we do for ancient Greek Mythology, one I've been wanting to do for a super long time!

Chicken Little/ Henny Penny

I took a long break since the return of our deployed soldier, and am finally back in the saddle again. School is in session and the household has settled down enough to focus on our beloved bookworm fun! This week we had adventures with Chicken Little.

We love folk tales around here, and Chicken Little (sometimes called Henny Penny) is a classic.  Here are four different versions, each more creative than the other, that we enjoyed reading:  Henny Penny by Vivian French, Henny Penny by Jane Wattenburg, Chicken Little by Steven Kellogg, and Chicken Little by Rebecca and Ed Emberley. Some end in tragedy while others surprise you with a twist or two-- I especially like Kellogg's addition of a fat hippo.

Our craft was simple but glorious: Take a sheet of cardboard, cut out the shape of an acorn, and glue items (in this case acorns from our yard and popcorn) to the cardboard. 

We played out two different versions for dramatic play.  First, we used creatures from our felt board and Castle Grayskull (a leftover from Dad's childhood that served well as the fox's lair). We improvised a little-- the peacock and ostrich took the place of Henny Penny and Goosey Loosey.  Next we used dinosaur puppets, with Rexy Lexy being the villain.  Loads of fun!

Incidentally, I do not recommend the movie of Chicken Little as an extension of this activity. It's fine as a movie, but is so far from the original plot of the story that I don't think it enhances the lesson.  Aliens play a big role... enough said.

Come back around next week for some fun with archaeology! 

Deployments

Daddy's coming home from Iraq!  This week's post is about books and activities that helped our family survive the long year.


The Invisible String is not specific to deployments, but it's a great read for anyone dealing with separation, even just during the school day or sleeping in a separate bedroom.  It's lovingly reassuring without any cheesiness.  Perfect.

A Paper Hug gave us a great craft idea that doubled as a nice present for Dad (see below).  I edited the first line from "Daddy went to war" to "Daddy went to Iraq," for reading in our house. The paper hug craft is one I recommend to anyone who is separated by distance, and could be a great gift for grandparents and other relatives.

Daddy's in Iraq, But I Want Him Back had a catchy title, which my kids sometimes spontaneously repeated in odd places (like the grocery store).  It was one I had to practice a few times, though, to get through it without choking up.  Tough stuff, children's lit.

Hero Dad is an uplifting read, and even though the book dad does soldierly stuff like driving a tank and using night vision goggles, while our dad is more of a scholarly type, the boys didn't seem to care.

One activity we did during the deployment came from the book mentioned earlier, A Paper Hug.  Here is T's paper hug, with the one change being that we used thick red ribbon instead of yarn to measure the distance between his hands. The kids were excited to send their "hugs" to Daddy.

Another thing we always enjoyed was decorating boxes to Daddy.  Sometimes we painted them or put handprints on; other times we used stickers.  Most of these boxes were chock full of artwork and snacks-- whatever will I do with all the art after he gets back...?

No fingerplay this week, but I DO have something for "dramatic play."  :)  The kids made up this game, I swear, but pretty often they'd make me pretend to be Dad.  Then they'd show me around the house as if I'd never been there before, introducing me to the new baby, the guinea pig, the bedrooms, etc.  I felt a little weird about it, and they always made me do a low Daddy voice (sometimes for very long periods), but it kept them happy so I did.  Thank goodness real Daddy can come back and fill in for his part now.

The Sesame Street Talk, Listen, Connect website has some great videos and printables for families going through a deployment.  We got our free copy of the video where Elmo's dad "has to go away for a while" and that helped give the boys words to express what was happening to our family.  It also gave them ideas about how to celebrate the homecoming and made them feel more comfortable with the circus of emotions that happen.  I thought it was good, but we didn't watch it tons.  Just enough.  Sometimes the boys didn't want to be reminded of the whole issue, either, so we took breaks from all these books and videos.  A year is a long time.

We also have a Daddy Doll from Hug A Hero.  To be honest, the voice clip device that goes inside it with Daddy's voice on it is the best part as far as my kids are concerned.


Something else I did that might sound weird or gross but seemed cool to me at the time was to freeze bits of holiday meals for my husband.  So at Christmas I took a partitioned freezer container and put a bit of each item (duck, cranberries, roll, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc.) into the sections.  When he came home on R&R I defrosted his Christmas dinner, along with a slice of "Welcome, New Baby" cake and some pieces of the boys' birthday cakes.  I don't know if these things tasted very good, but he ate them dutifully and at least he knows we were thinking about him.

We got our welcome home sign from Build A Sign.  (Shh, don't tell him.  It's a secret!  I don't think he'll read my blog while he's flying back from Kuwait.  Cross your fingers.) They had a special going on, free banners for military homecomings, so I only paid for the shipping.  The banner is truly awesome!  Be forewarned, though, it takes a very long time to get here.  Bank on 3 months.

My favorite book for grown-ups is You Know When the Men are Gone, a book of short stories that was truly fantastic.  I read it in a weekend.  I get almost all of my books from the library, but this one I bought-- it's that good.

That's it for this week.  We have to go to the airport with our cool sign!  See ya next week for more bookworm fun.